Film #38 - Ted

Well that was a lot of things. Funny. Entertaining. A goldmine of quotes for slackers for years to come. But one thing it really wasn’t is a film.

In the actual film, Ted is
more often holding a bong.

And I’m not sure it was even trying. Heavily touted as the first feature film from Seth MacFarlane, the creator of animated sitcom Family Guy (among others), Ted doesn’t really stray too far from its television roots, feeling more like a series of loosely connected vignettes rather than a thing in its own right with an overarching story to tell.

Ted is the story (and I use the term loosely) of a boy whose wish for his plush bear friend to come to life is magically granted one Christmas night. Flashing forward 27 years, we find that the boy in question (John Bennett, played by Mark Wahlberg) has become a minimum wage slacker in a co-dependent relationship with the now foul-mouthed teddy bear Ted (voiced by Seth MacFarlane himself), much to the consternation of his long-suffering girlfriend Lori (Mila Kunis, reunited with Wahlberg after 2008’s Max Payne).

And that’s about it. Everything else that happens in the movie is either completely dispensable, or actually dispensed with, usually within minutes of being introduced. It’s a bit unclear whether MacFarlane is either so used to writing for television that he’s struggling to break his habits, or whether he just doesn’t get that cinema is a different medium altogether.

The other thing that seems to be a carryover from television sitcom writing is the relative lack of stakes. I believe we’re meant to take Joel McHale’s smarmy Rex or Giovanni Ribisi’s creepy stalker Donny as serious threats to John and Ted respectively but the film just doesn't spend enough time building either of them up for them to be anything other than sideshow attractions. In the case of Rex especially, we’re specifically told not to be threatened by him and then, just as he finally is getting some traction in his pursuit of Lori, his “menace” is completely evaporated through an unnecessary fart gag.

Yeah, I'm not even going to touch how women are treated in Ted

It’s not like the film couldn’t jettison some material to make room for a fuller story either. You get the feeling that John and Lori’s respective workmates were intended to be something more than they are in the final cut. In John’s case in particular, we seem to spend a suspicious amount of time setting them up (what is Laura Vandervoort even doing here?) with specific clichés but only Patrick Warburton’s Guy gets anything like a story  - and it’s a one-note joke.

Speaking of jokes, I guess we come to the central question of Ted for most cinemagoers – is it funny? Yes. It actually is. It’s the kind of humour you’re already familiar with thanks to Family Guy but, hey, that’s why you’re here right?

There is a slight tendency to confuse ‘shocking’ with ‘funny’ of course, but there always has been in MacFarlane’s ouvre and the central joke of an adorable teddy bear saying incredibly crude things probably doesn’t have the punch that it might have had MacFarlane not already introduced us to an evil genius baby, a leftist intellectual dog, an East German goldfish etc. etc.

But, by and large, MacFarlane knows his stuff and fans of his work know what they’re getting in for. There is, of course, an emphasis on pop culture of the 80s which still hasn’t completely lost its charm for those of us who remember that decade and MacFarlane’s poking at social mores can still be highly amusing even it’s a well trodden road. Some of it can be a little mean spirited (did we really need to kick Brandon Routh while he’s down?).

And, the problem with “nothing is sacred” as a writing technique is that, well, nothing is sacred. When everything is on the table to be mocked the film has nowhere to go when it needs to ask you to take it seriously. But that’s par for the course in MacFarlane’s universe and most cinemagoers are savvy enough to expect that going in.

No, the only real issue with the comedy in Ted is that it often detracts from the story. MacFarlane pretty much never deepens a moment when he can just blast past it with a joke and so we just don’t give a shit if John and Lori stay together or Ted gets kidnapped by Donny until the film specifically tells us to. And it literally has to stop in the middle of its ‘climax’ to tell us to.

Ultimately, Ted will be very popular with audiences. It’s funny, it at least keeps things moving, and the character animation of Ted himself is indeed adorable. Given that it’s MacFarlane’s first feature (and that I still have a lot of good will for the man from the early seasons of Family Guy and American Dad), I’m tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that the teething issues on display in Ted are sorted out by the time he does his next feature.

And, if nothing else, watching Giovanni Ribisi dancing to Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now” is possibly the sexiest I’ve seen him in years.