Review by Matt Finley
TED was Seth MacFarlane’s last
chance to win me over. I won’t say I don’t respect the man –
he’s a hard worker who has managed to build himself a cozy
primetime empire out of nothing but some college animations and a
handful of low-hanging pop culture references – but I’ve never
been partial to his work. Still, whether or not I enjoy Family
Guy or its even less palatable sister programs, I was hoping
MacFarlane would avail himself of the silver screen’s
expansive diameter and muster something of broader topical scope –
perhaps even richer artistic depth – than the Griffins’
interminable, chaotic rabble of celebrity pot shots,
insipid film homages and quotidian obscenities.
It was his last chance, and he failed.
With soaring, stratosphere-breaching colors.
The trailer pretty much says it all:
John Bennett, an awkward 8-year-old loner magically wishes his plush
bear, Teddy, to life. 25 years later, the two inseparable friends
remain locked in a state of adolescent immaturity, spending their
days drinking, smoking weed and watching the films of their shared
childhood, as John’s (Mark Wahlberg) increasingly impatient
girlfriend Lori (Mila Kunis) begs him to ditch Ted (voiced by
Macfarlane) and move on with his life.
Ted’s a cute, fuzzy teddy bear. And
he gets high and swears a lot. It’s a quarter-assed nugget of
dead-end ironic juxtaposition that, from our first glimpse of present
day Ted - a close up of the fluffy grizzly sucking a bong – feels
toothless in that extra cringey way where the writers’ (MacFarlane
and a couple Family Guy veterans) palpable desperation
to create something “edgy” actually serves to sand down what few
snagging corners the piece may have had. Incapable of the effortless,
debauched élan of Peter Jackson’s still-squicky MEET THE
FEEBLES, TED wanders a comedic desert, repeatedly
confusing its setup – a foul-mouthed bear and a wasted Bostonian
walk into a bar – for the punchline.
If MacFarlane was content to cash out
with 90 minutes of coke-dusted vulgarities brayed out from a boorish
bear’s Peter Griffin-cloned vocal cords, I may have been able to
dismiss the whole thing as a stoner-baiting lark, unmemorable as it
was vacuous. But he has to raise himself one hackneyed romantic
storyline. Just when you're relieved to see that Ted’s not on
screen, in kicks John and Lori’s relationship: a blandly
predictable, sentimental mawk in through which the movie’s one and
only theme – the lady-deflating potential of Apatowian man-child
syndrome – is regular hammered, then sledge hammered, then outright
stated by Kunis’ character: if Bennett doesn’t give up his Teddy
Bear, he’ll never grow up. My attention folds.
The good news is that the endless
inane flashbacks and “remember that time”s of
Family Guy notoriety are all but absent. The
bad news? This means that the aforementioned lazy pop culture
references are forced into double duty, filling every bare corner of
celluloid with a mix of contemporary name-checking cruelties (Ted
declares an exaggeratedly sour musical number “better than Katy
Perry.” Pretty clever, right?) And ham-fisted, over-engineered ‘80s
nostalgia, including an entire subplot devoted to Mike Hodges 1980
adaptation of FLASH GORDON.
The single scene that is a flashback?
MacFarlane and his actors recreate, wholesale, the disco scene from
AIRPLANE! Meaning, the actual jokes in the scene are, you
know, from AIRPLANE! Adding nothing to the characters, plot or
tone of the film, the scene serves only to let the audience know
that, definitively, Seth MacFarlane has seen AIRPLANE!
Is our culture so self-absorbed
and desperate for self-congratulation that the bare experience of
understanding a joke supersedes the quality of the joke’s content
and delivery? Or is the current state of mainstream pop culture truly
so dire – it’s financial and artistic shepherds so lost to
indolent greed - that we’ve made the collective decision to
regress, to cannibalize our collective cultural memory into the ad
hoc disposable humor of Internet memes and movies like TED?
While I certainly won’t spoil the
ending, know this: if TOY STORY 3, in all its wit and
heartfelt earnestness is about our ability, in maturing, to sustain
the collective creative joy of youth through the
continued dissemination of humanity’s greatest gift
– the unfettered potential of the human imagination, TED is
about the hoarding of cultural wealth, and of the trademarked
properties and copyrighted dreams we endlessly, selfishly reassemble
for our own fleeting satisfaction because, hey, it’s easier than
making something new. (1 out of 4 Stars)
Aww now does the review have to turn into a referendum on Seth McFarlane? Were it not for his satire I'd be back to watching the NBC Dateline true-murder-of-the-week Sunday-schlock special and bemoaning my wasted life even more than I already. Even so, I see what "South Park" meant when it proposed that "Family Guy" is written by manatees. And I do rather hope there isn't a TED 2.
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