Giving Ted 2 a bad review seems like the easy move, the critical equivalent of shooting at a stationary target from point blank rage.
But before you write this off as some sort of snobbery, I ask that you consider that I try to appreciate certain movies for what they try to do. Not every movie is Citizen Kane or aspires to be a Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards. I get that. I liked Entourage as an extension of the TV show and a service to its fans. Spy totally hit its target as both a broad comedy and clever parody of the spy and action movie genres.
In my view, all you can really ask of a comedy is to make you laugh. Sure, it’s great if the script is tight and moves along. Funny, believable performances from the actors involved most certainly helps. (And if that comes from someone not normally known for comedy, such as Jason Statham in Spy or Channing Tatum in the 21 Jump Street series, even better.) But the bar doesn’t have to be that high. Bring the funny. Get us laughing, preferably a lot during a 90-minute to two-hour running time.
So that’s the problem with Ted 2. It just didn’t make me laugh that much. That probably won’t apply to everyone. Some of the jokes that I thought were lazy or too easy might work for certain people. But the movie feels like someone who’s trying really hard — too hard, really — and constantly missing.
I’m not saying I didn’t laugh at all. But for every 10 jokes Seth McFarlane and fellow writers Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild throw at you, only one or two hit the mark. (The gay and racial jokes feel particularly out of touch and tone-deaf, considering what happened in the news last week.) And that just doesn’t feel like enough, especially for the trouble of going to the movies, handing over your 10 bucks for a ticket and sitting in a theater for two hours.
Ted 2 is very much a rental, or something to wait for on cable. That’s as plain as I can say it. Unless you enjoy sitting in a quiet movie theater while no one laughs (except maybe the people who got drunk or high before showtime). Then you’ll have a great time here.
I don’t hold the grudge against McFarlane that many critics and detractors do. I wasn’t going into this movie looking to skewer him. I enjoy most of McFarlane’s work. Family Guy is always reliable for some laughs. And I really liked the first Ted. I thought it was hilarious, even when I knew some jokes were wrong to laugh at. To me, that’s McFarlane’s gift: He gets you to laugh when you’re trying not to. Even when he makes the easy joke, he does it well enough that it’s still funny.
Ted worked because it had a great premise. The idea of a kid wishing for his favorite toy to come to life is a sweet fable that virtually anyone can relate to. It may have even more resonance in this era when kids don’t seem to go out to play anymore, their interactions with friends tightly scheduled. Creating your own friends in your imagination doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. Maybe it’s even a necessity.
But then McFarlane put a brilliant twist on it, having the kid and best friend grow up together into blue-collar, foul-mouthed, fun-loving bros who just want to hang out, get high, watch TV and meet women.
The story didn’t even dwell on the wonder of a teddy bear miraculously coming to life or attempt to explain anything. It just went straight to the laughs that came with watching a children’s toy smoking pot, watching porn, telling dirty jokes and cracking brutal insults at people. Couple that with Mark Wahlberg showing a great comic touch and a willingness to play against his tough-guy image and you had something close to a modern comedy classic.
So it was probably natural that a sequel would soon follow. We wanted more of the potty-mouthed teddy bear, his charmingly clueless best friend and trying to apply that absurdity to real-life situations. But Ted already told the joke, and Ted 2 tries to stretch it further. In the process, McFarlane shows just how thin the premise really is once you get past the initial gag.
How far can you take the idea of a toy come to life? At what point is it an actual being with feelings and desires, rather than just a thing? These are rather deep ideas, but McFarlane is only going to explore that depth so far before he has to make another dick joke or create a slapstick set piece. Not only is that what the audience presumably wants, but it’s also McFarlane’s comfort zone.
Yet because of that, Ted 2 just doesn’t make for a coherent movie. It’s a collection of jokes and skits strung together into an endeavor that somehow runs two hours long. And as you know if you’re familiar with his work, he’ll hammer the same jokes over and over again, long after the funny has been squeezed out. Poor Amanda Seyfried and the size of her eyes are one of those gags wrung dry.
There are far too many scenes simply created for an attempt at laughs (like pointless cameos from Liam Neeson and Tom Brady), with no regard for moving the story forward. Maybe that’s expecting too much, and maybe Ted did the same thing, but it was funny enough that I didn’t notice the tape holding the seams in place.
For the second year in a row, McFarlane has made what will probably turn out to be the most disappointing comedy of the summer. Ted 2 is better than A Million Ways to Die in the West, but that really isn’t saying much. Wahlberg and Seyfried try hard to sell McFarlane’s jokes and don’t act embarrassed to be in this movie at all (unlike Morgan Freeman, who looked like he wanted to fire his agent every minute he was on screen), but it’s just not enough. They can only generate so many laughs from what simply isn’t funny.
