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Ted (15)
© Unknown - all rights reserved |
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| Tookey's Rating |
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6
/10 |
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| Average Rating |
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5.57
/10 |
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| Starring |
Seth McFarlane  , Mark Wahlberg , Mila Kunis
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| Full Cast > |
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Directed by:
Seth MacFarlane
Written by:
Seth MacFarlane, Alec Sulkin, Wellesley Wild, from a story by MacFarlane
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| Released: |
2012 |
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| Genre: |
COMEDY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
106 |
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Funnier than the average bear. |
Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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Ted (pictured centre) is a teddy-bear, but he is emphatically not for children. He’s more boorish than bearish, and the film bearing his name is a filthy-minded, foul-mouthed black comedy that makes Bad Santa look restrained.
If you’re easily offended, I’d advise giving this a miss. But you will be overlooking a film that’s going to be this summer’s biggest comedy hit. Many moments in it are among the funniest of the year.
It starts in Boston, 1985. John Bennett (Brett Manley), a shy Jewish eight year-old, gets a teddy bear for Christmas, a festival John associates with getting beaten up by non-Jewish kids. He kisses his only friend, names him Ted and promises to love him forever. He also makes a wish that Ted could talk.
The next morning, Ted has a surprisingly wide vocabulary, which scares the hell out of John’s parents. Ted’s verbal skills make him a national celebrity, but the public soon tires of him, and he retires from public life to hang out with John and be his best friend forever.
The next plot development is similar to the one behind The Muppets. John, now a 35 year-old slacker played by Mark Wahlberg, wants to behave like a grown-up to please his alluring girl friend Lori (Mila Kunis), but Ted, John’s friend since childhood, is too obnoxious and possessive for any prospective wife to tolerate. She makes John choose between her and his fluffy toy.
The central joke is that Ted may have started off young and cute, but he grows into a disreputable, pot-smoking, lascivious layabout. His tendency to bring home hookers might be unexceptional in a football player, but he’s a far from ideal influence on our hero.
Seth Macfarlane voices the bear like a Bostonian Danny De Vito, with a string of sexist, racially offensive, scatological jokes.
For about half an hour, it’s a hoot to hear these kind of things come out of an apparently innocent teddy bear. I enjoyed Ted introducing Wahlberg to new kinds of pot: “mind-rape”, “gorilla panic”, “They’re coming, they’re coming!” and “This one is Permanent”.
It’s also fun to hear a plummy-voiced English narrator (Patrick Stewart) with an evident distaste for popular culture and Hollywood garbage like the stuff he’s having to narrate.
Wahlberg proved in The Other Guys that he can do comedy, and – though he’s mostly the straight guy - he too has his comic moments, especially in a scene where he rattles off a list of white trash girls’ names.
The jolliest scenes are ones where Wahlberg and Macfarlane can forget about plot, and seemingly improvise riffs on their weird friendship and mutual passion for Mike Hodges’ kitsch space opera Flash Gordon.
The relationship between Wahlberg and Kunis’s characters is far weaker. Kunis has to be a nag, which seems an awful waste of her natural naughtiness. The film is, unfortunately, too close to the oeuvre of Judd Apatow in its fear and hatred of women.
It turns into just another character study of a middle-aged man trying to extend his adolescence to previously unknown lengths. Much like any Apatow movie, in fact.
No film can be bad that contains hostile criticism of Adam Sandler and his awful comedy Jack and Jill, but the truth is that the plot for this movie exploits the same basic idea: a nice guy trying to cope with the socially obnoxious creature with whom he grew up.
Writer-director Seth Macfarlane made his name with animated TV shows (The Family Guy, American Dad! and The Cleveland Show). They favour gags over plot, and this lets him down when he has to make a film that’s feature-length.
The plot starts moving in ever safer, more conventional directions. The least gripping part of all is an attempt to kidnap Ted by an obvious psychopath (Giovanni Ribisi) with a creepy, overweight teenage son (Aiden Minck) whom Ted tastelessly addresses as Susan Boyle.
This thriller sub-plot plot is charmless, ugly and – worst of all – unfunny. Its only reason for existence is that it leads to a big chase that belongs in a different movie, and reinforces the suspicion that the screenplay ran out of ideas half an hour ago.
Still, underlying the poor plotting and some questionable humour is a kind of Spielbergian wonder that miraculously prevents it from unpleasantly offensive. The bond between man and bear is almost as touching as the one between E.T. and Elliot.
Ted may be a one-joke movie, but the joke is funny, and the special effects are so believable that you forget there aren’t such things as garrulous, debauched teddy bears. There’s nothing fluffy or adorable about Ted, but – at least for the first hour - he’s a lot of fun to be with.
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