The Weekend Review: Ted 2

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

Ted 2 - the awaited sequel to Seth MacFarlane's 2012 comedy about a kid whose teddy bear comes to life - hit theaters this last weekend to surprisingly little fanfare.  It fell direly short of industry expectations and Ted 3 is doubtlessly not in the immediate future for MacFarlane's host of loyal fans.

Following marital difficulties with Tami-Lynn, Ted concludes that the only way to save his marriage is to have a child with her.  Being unable to impregnate her himself, however, he needs to find a sperm donor, the search for which dregs up the fact that, according to the United States government, Ted is not a person.  Having lost his job, rights and even his marriage, Ted and Johnny sue the government to restore his civil rights and personhood.

I'm skeptical of comedies as a rule, but never more so than in the weeks preceding the first Ted's release in 2012.  Now, I trusted Seth MacFarlane to make me laugh - his track record with Family Guy and American Dad was impeccable - but the movie itself just looked so incredibly stupid.  Combine that with it being his first movie - and live-action to boot - and going to see it ended up being a pretty hard sell.

But, to MacFarlane's credit, Ted proved to be downright hilarious.  It was clever, funny and even surprisingly emotional.  While it certainly had its share of issues - the same as any movie - it ended up being one of the most enjoyable and memorable movies of 2012.

The sequel... not quite so much.  Don't worry, it's still hilarious.  The various plot points of hunting for a sperm donor and suing the government are wrought with comedic strife that MacFarlane expertly navigates.  The problem's that this movie faces have far more to do with structure than content.

Somewhere between the first movie and the sequel, MacFarlane lost Mila Kunis.  Being a integral part of the movie's cast, her presence had to be explained away.  But rather than just keeping her off camera, they wrote her out entirely.  In the last three years, her character and Johnny got married and divorced, forcing a cheapened story arc on Johnny about getting back into the dating scene.

Amanda Seyfried's Samantha, while a worthy effort, inherently fails to measure up to Mila's Lori.  She's a plot-necessitated character that fails to challenge the status quo of the movie's headliners (Lori's greatest strength in the first movie).  Sure, you get some funny bits about a dick-shaped bong and a stellar acoustic number from her, but she fails to bring anything substantive to the film.

And for as sound as the first, and even second, acts were, the third act is a mess of tangled plot points and unnecessary narratives.  Donnie - Ted's stalker from the first film - returns with a Hasbro-backed plan to sabotage the bear's court case so that he's declared property, and thus far more susceptible to theft, so that Hasbro can dissect and mass produce sapient teddy bears.

You see the problem there, right?  Ted's quest for personhood is already far more interesting - not to mention grockable - than the plot line that supposedly informs it.  It recycles the previous movie's villain for some third act stakes-raising that ultimately feels like a tired retread of a much better movie.  That's not even mentioning how confusing and downright stupid it sounds on the face of it.

That's not even mentioning how half of the movie feels like it's been left on the cutting room floor.  In one scene, Ted crashes a car into a barn, stranding him, Johnny and Sam in a pot field overnight.  Great pains are taken to set up the field's owner - including dredging up a shotgun and guitar - who is never shown.  Judging by the movie's trailers, this was supposed to end in some kind of car chase, but just feels like a half-baked setup to a payoff that ultimately never happened.

Now, none of this is to say that Ted 2 is a bad movie.  On the contrary, it's a gut-bustingly funny one that fans of MacFarlane, Family Guy and the first Ted are bound to love.  It's a solid, if sloppily written, comedy that Becky told me to stop laughing so loudly during on at least one occasion.  Just don't expect it to be as good as the first.

So what did you think about Ted 2?  Was it as funny as the first Ted?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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