Aside from over-familiarity and increasingly indulgent premises, Fox’s Family Guy has been criticized lately for attempting to cram in awkward dramatic conflict and existential crises (even the dog Brian has contemplated suicide) alongside the show’s torrents of scatterbrained, scatological anti-humor and 1980s pop culture references. Making way for pandering sentimentality has done little to win over the show’s detractors and mars Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane’s debut feature Ted. MacFarlane’s televised cottage industry is perhaps too unmoored to make it as a full length film effort, so the writer-director has incorporated some of his most familiar motifs into the raunchy live-action/CGI comedy Ted – the clever premise of which finds Mark Wahlberg’s 35-year-old slacker John Bennett sharing a bond with the teddy bear he wished to life at age 10 and who has now grown into a foulmouthed, stoned slacker. As a hook, it’s a pretty funny one – that is for the first hour or so.
Ted (as voiced with MacFarlane’s Archie Bunker/Fred Flintstone drawl) is another anthropomorphized joke-machine from the man who has created talking fish, aliens, dogs, and bears for his animated assembly-line. The oversized teddy-bear throws out one off-color barb after another (vaguely racist and sexist jokes abound as expected) and is rendered with seamless CGI animation. The joke is that after the plush miracle’s early years as a world celebrity (his appearance on the Carson Tonight Show is a clever use of the technology), the novelty wears off and he falls back into obscurity – which is where we find Ted and John, now in their 30s, obsessively watching the camp 1980s classic Flash Gordon and making fart jokes much to the chagrin of John’s upwardly mobile, impossibly sexy girlfriend Lori (Mila Kunis). Lori has tired of the frat atmosphere and insists that John and Ted cease living together if John is ever going to improve his status.
Just like the bountiful references to the television and juvenilia of MacFarlane’s youth so key to Family Guy’s tangential cutaways, Ted should register the proper, fleeting guffaws of recognition from a crowd raised on Nintendo, ALF, grunge music, and whatever other cult items MacFarlane can recall for his show-and-tell version of comedy. It’s easy but often hilarious stuff, if too careful about explaining punch lines and references until they lose all impact.
Mark Wahlberg in “Ted.” © 2012 – Universal Pictures.
The first hour is warm, witty, and brisk until the core friendship is threatened and Ted has to get his own place where he entertains call girls and throws 1990s karaoke jam parties. While Ted has his fun, Wahlberg and Kunis engage in dull chemistry and Joel McHale provides the romantic villainy (in what I assume will be one of many type-casted jerk roles for the Community snark machine). Ted is only truly dire when the title character is off-screen so that John and Lori can engage in boring Romantic Comedy 101 of which the outcome is never in question. Then, there is the loony subplot concerning Giovanni Ribisi’s dangerously obsessive fanatic kidnapping the bear and leading an overblown chase sequence ending in a Wrigley Field-set finale that plays like a leaden mashup of “Benji” and Hitchcock.
Ted is most enjoyable when sticking to the modest banter between John and Ted (or the hilariously brutal fight between them in a motel room when things get dark) and less so when the film limps in to bland Sean Levy territory.
Gregory Fichter
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