Mark Wahlberg, right, and his talking teddy bear. (Universal Pictures)
On balance, there’s nothing wrong with smoking a giant bag of weed and saying to one of your equally blazed bros, “You know what would be awesome? A movie about a talking teddy bear who says nasty things and does lots of drugs.”
And when you’re Seth MacFarlane, it’s probably a lot easier to execute that THC-inspired fantasy.
But MacFarlane and his pals must have been burning some crunky shit, because even though I was sober when I saw Ted, had I brought along a one-hitter I probably still would have come away with the kind of headache that accompanies low-grade pot.
I’m not a fan of MacFarlane’s other works—the Fox animated series Family Guy, American Dad! and The Cleveland Show—which on any given Sunday evening, are repetitive, crass and well, frankly not that funny. Given a live-action tableau and a $65 million budget, MacFarlane shows little progress as an entertainer. In fact, the format is too permissive, with punchlines being repeated four, five, six times; pop culture references that fall flat; and gross-out gags that are so expected are hardly disgusting at all.
Ted is another iteration of what appears to be one of MacFarlane’s lifelong fantasies—that of a talking, anthropomorphic pet. Whereas Family Guy’s oafish protagonist Peter Griffin has Brian, an erudite, booze-swilling canine, Ted features as its title character a slovenly, vulgar teddy bear brought to life by a childhood wish. (And, voiced by MacFarlane, Ted sounds awfully similar to fat, stupid Peter.)
That child, John Bennett, grows up to look like Mark Wahlberg, who once again exaggerates his Boston accent, but to a level so extreme that it makes his characters in The Departed and The Fighter sound Midwestern. John, as shown in an opening-credits montage, enjoyed childhood fame as the owner of a stuffed animal that magically sprung to life but wound up shackled to a dead-end job once the marvel of his trick pony wore off.
Of course, as only happens in movies, John lives in the well-appointed South End apartment owned by his girlfriend, Lori, played by a badly used Mila Kunis. In Ted, much as in the rest of the MacFarlane-verse, women are treated as either demanding adversaries or cheap dates. Kunis, whose wisecracking voice performance on Family Guy as the maltreated Meg Griffin is one of that show’s few virtues, is employed here only to be the villain who wants to push Ted out of John’s life.
But why wouldn’t Lori try to go to such lengths? After all, she’s a rising executive living with an underachiever whose best friend is a pot-smoking plush toy. Then again, Lori readily cops to her girlfriends that one of her main reasons for staying in the relationship is that John is “basically the hottest guy in Boston.”
The humor is left to John and Ted and, as in MacFarlane’s television series, the jokes are at the expense of various groups—women, gays, Jews, blacks, Asians, women and women. Not that MacFarlane invented misogynistic comedy, much less misogynistic stoner comedy, but I’m sorry, after three TV shows and now a movie, his “He-Man Woman Haters’ Club” act is quite thin.
MacFarlane, and his loyalists, will likely defend this rampant deployment of stereotypes as comedy at the expense of the idiot who invokes them, but even that excuse seems worn out. Evan MacFarlane’s own explanation, as recounted in a recent profile of him in The New Yorker, wavers. Of MacFarlane’s brand of humor, Claire Hoffman wrote:
When I asked about the ethnic jokes, MacFarlane offered the enlightened-liberal defense—at first. “We are presenting the Archie Bunker point of view and making fun of the stereotypes—not making fun of the groups,” he said. “But if I’m really being honest, then maybe there’s a part of me that’s stuck in high school and we’re laughing because we’re not supposed to. I don’t know the psychology. At the core, I know none of us gives a shit.”
Thing is, in Ted, the number of things about which MacFarlane does not give a shit—or at least appears incapable of doing so—is rampant. He’s not a very gifted visual director, and any sense of tension, important even in the most nonsensical comedies, is absent. But Ted’s largest flaw is its runtime. At nearly 110 minutes, it’s about half an hour longer than it needs to be. Compare that to the seminal stoner comedy Up in Smoke, which at 85 minutes runs its course before the high wears off.
The drug jokes, even a madcap cocaine binge, wear out; a cameo by Norah Jones comes way too late; and a running gag involving John and Ted’s love for Flash Gordon is so overworked that one of MacFarlane’s rumored pet manatees probably died from exhaustion. There’s nothing to be gleaned from watching this Ted talk.
Ted
Directed by Seth MacFarlane.
Written by MacFarlane, Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild
With Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Seth MacFarlane, Giovanni Ribisi, Patrick Warburton and Sam Jones.
Rated R for lots of naughty words and a bad case of the munchies.
Opens today at all the multiplexes.
