I walked out of “Ted 2” wishing I had worn protection before watching Seth MacFarlane’s sequel to his highly successful comedy about a degenerate teddy bear.
You’re hit in the face by so much excess junk that it feels like waking up and realizing you took the wrong person home from Mill Avenue after too much to drink.
It’s a case study in what happens when a successful director gets carried away and loses himself like someone who took one too many bong hits and is now naked on the street. At first it’s funny, but then all the flab begins to show and it gets sad.
As a comedy film, it’s not half bad. The genre is infamous for producing bad sequels, but I can’t say I didn’t laugh at "Ted 2" because there are some well-placed jokes and the entire cast is right on the money.
Mark Wahlberg maintained the intensity that makes him a natural at comedy and Amanda Seyfried proved to be an apt replacement for Mila Kunis who originally starred in the first film.
MacFarlane also has a knack for putting his characters in ridiculous situations and letting them play out for maximum laughs. He’s like the guy in a bar who knows how to milk that funny joke; but eventually the joke goes bad, and you’re stuck with bad milk.
The film tends to linger in scenes that are long past funny and emphasize jokes throughout the film that weren’t even that amusing in the first place. It was funny seeing Flash Gordon in the first film and I got a minor chuckle seeing him again in this one. By the time he shows up in the climax, I groaned because of how obvious it was.
MacFarlane knows how to direct a clever scene and deliver killer one-liners, so it’s disappointing to see the film fall so much into the trap of callbacks to the first film and lazy pop culture references that are amusing at best.
Perhaps the funny thing about all of this is that for most of the film, "Ted 2" avoids the dreaded comedy sequel trap of repeating the first film’s plot.
The idea of Ted proving his person hood is intriguing and gives the film an unexpected weight in an era where an oppressed minority of our own fights for their civil rights. It’s a message that manages to remain interesting even during the pot smoking and ASU jokes.
But then the film decides to redo the climax of the first film in a bigger way, and it gets a lot less interesting; the big emotional finale is revealed to be a joke, classifying it as a downright waste of time. That may be amusing if you’re high, but to anyone else, it’s dumb and not in a funny way.
The film says that in order for Ted to be considered a person, he needs to contribute to society. I would argue that in order for "Ted 2" to be considered a good movie, it needed to lay off the first film’s bong and come up with some original material.
Reach the reporter at jagger.czajka@asu.edu or follow @JaggerCzajka on Twitter.
Like The State Press on Facebook and follow @statepress on Twitter.
