Ted Review

So this is what a feature film written and directed by Seth MacFarlane would look like. MacFarlane, a television producer best known as the creator of Family Guy and a couple of other TV shows a lot like Family Guy, has had the fart-joke market cornered for years. Ted is his first full-length feature, and although it doesn’t stray very far from formula it’s a fun enough hour-and-a-half at the movies. Odds are good that we’ll see MacFarlane’s particular brand of funny up on the big screen again before too long.

If that happens, MacFarlane will have plenty of company, because despite its wacky premise Ted fits very comfortably within a pattern of comedies produced over the last seven or so years. Ted, like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Wedding Crashers and Knocked Up before it, is a movie about an arrested adolescent. The man-child of the moment is John Bennett (Mark Wahlberg), a 35-year-old rental car clerk who’s best friends with a walking, talking teddy bear named Ted (Seth MacFarlane). When he was a young boy, you see, John wished upon a star that his teddy bear would come to life and be his friend. The bear obliged.

Which was all quite a shock when it first happened, but the movie quickly stops treating the fact of Ted’s existence as a miracle and starts depicting him more as a washed-up child star. 27 years after coming to life, Ted is living in Boston as John’s roommate where he’s become a listless, foul-mouthed pot fiend. Much of the humor derives predictably from contrasting Ted’s cuddly look with his hard-partying antics. “Predictable” may not be the first word you’d think would describe an R-rated comedy about a sentient stuffed animal, but if you’ve ever watched Family Guy I can guarantee that much of the humor will be familiar. There’s a lot of politically incorrect dialogue, quick cutaways to random jokes, and a ceaseless parade of pop culture references both obvious (Ted and John recreate the bicycle bit from E.T.) and obscure (an extended joke about kitschy 80s sci-fi flick Flash Gordon).

And if you get a kick out of Family Guy, I can also guarantee that you’ll get a kick out of this. MacFarlane is willing to go pretty far for a laugh, and there are some creatively vulgar one-liners that it ends up do indeed sound funnier when said by a wee little teddy bear. The script mixes up jokes that sound like they were written for some edgy romantic comedy with physical gags that seem plucked from Looney Tunes. The movie’s best comic roll comes at a party Ted throws at his apartment, where an angry duck, an intergalactic space emperor, and a lot of cocaine mix to pretty funny effect.

Not all the gags work. MacFarlane’s slacker-speak can be a bit much, and sometimes you get the idea that his jokes are funny to him first and foremost and to the rest of us on an ad hoc basis, but when the funny fails the story is there to catch it. John has a girlfriend named Lori (Mila Kunis) who he’s been dating for four years. She’s ready to take it to the next level, but John would rather get high with his best bud. That his best bud happens to be two feet tall and made of felt doesn’t make the story any less formulaic, but all the actors commit to their roles, with Wahlberg showing a solid sense of comic timing and Kunis doing what she can with the thankless role of The Girlfriend. In the end the story is still subservient to the gags, but Ted actually seems more invested in its characters than something like, say, The Hangover, which provides a threadbare line on which to hang jokes and calls it a day. There are earnest chucks of this movie that involve no jokes at all.

And honestly, I could have stood to have a little more, or less, of that. As it nears the home stretch the movie looks like it’s going to dive a little more deeply into its themes, but it chickens out at the last minute and ends with a silly, funny, silly monologue by Patrick Stewart telling us what became of the cast. And that’s okay, because randomly having Patrick Stewart send off a movie in which he should have no place is good for a chuckle, but I still wonder what would have happened if MacFarlane took just a few more risks. Maybe when he grows up.