‘Ted 2’ Review: Exactly What Is Seth MacFarlane’s Deal At This Point?

There’s this long-running fantasy I have where I meet Seth MacFarlane and we somehow end up having sex, and eventually I plunge both of my thumbs into his eye sockets. I would hope I don’t need to mention that the sex part is not the primary aim of the fantasy (though it’s inevitably not bad in my mind): more enjoyable is the feeling — like pushing a BBQ match through a lychee — of my thumbs descending into the inky black pits that house his optic nerves.

There’s a variation on said fantasy where the nightmare goes a step further, and involves my actual marriage to MacFarlane before the eye-gouging occurs. I can’t quite make out my dress, but it’s probably nice. One-upping a JK Wedding Dance-entrance, he stages a full-tilt Tommy Tune-esque Broadway number in the cathedral, featuring masses of backing dancers and the reanimated corpse of Alan Jay Lerner playing a new wave track on a keytar. I gradually realise that I will only ever play second fiddle to my new husband with the Fred Astaire dreams, and my bright future turns to ash and dust just out of reach of my fingertips. My best friends, my bridesmaids, are coupled up with his American Dad cast groomsmen; they’re crying, a lot. I cry, too.

Anyway, that’s a roundabout way of saying that his new film Ted 2 is definitely a motion picture in which a trash-talking teddy bear’s pursuit of personhood is compared — at length — to various actual and ongoing civil rights movements, and also in which Mark Wahlberg is at one point covered in literal litres of the semen of “black guys”.

–

Who Actually Cares?

Picking up six or so months after the events of storied cinematic masterpiece Ted, this film finds the eponymous bear (MacFarlane) at the altar: he’s marrying Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth). Don’t get too comfortable, though, because we’re first treated to an opening sequence in which Ted bounds around a la a Busby Berkeley routine — apparently MacFarlane has as burning a desire to star in a musical as I did in grade six when I wrote a fanfic essay about being Jonathan Pryce’s adopted daughter who grew up backstage. I got therapy to deal with my disintegrating dreams of Broadway stardom; I can’t speak for MacFarlane.

Ted’s best man and best buddy John (Wahlberg) has a busted marriage and a broken heart, and soon enough Ted and Tami-Lynn are heading for a dose of the same, so naturally they decide to have a baby to save the marriage. After their adoption application is turfed, the state of Massachusetts gets wind of the fact that Ted is, in fact, “property”, rendering his marriage annulled, his job withdrawn, and his life torn asunder.

John and Ted engage the services of a green young attorney, Samantha Leslie Jackson (Amanda Seyfried) — SAM L. JACKSON GEDDIT — to prove to the court and the country that Ted is a human being. They know she’s a good choice to represent them because she rips a massive bong in her office. Also, she went to Arizona State, which is a great opportunity for about three dozen jokes about sexual assault at colleges.

The trio prepare for the court case courtesy of a mystifying montage set in the city library to Bone Symphony’s One Foot In Front Of The Other (the use of which is at this point a MacFarlane leitmotif), which includes a Breakfast Club tribute. Sure.

There’s also a boring subplot about Donny (Giovanni Ribisi) trying to convince the head of Hasbro to clone Ted so that every child on earth can experience his love. At various occasions, Liam Neeson, Sam J. Jones, Tom Brady and Morgan Freeman turn up to debase themselves. Oh hey, did I mention that the Melbourne premiere party had jelly wrestlers and a mobile DJ? That was pretty swag.

Eventually it’s time for Ted’s day in court, and John Slattery sleepwalks into the court scenes as the defense, Shep Wild, and I really started to think deeply about whether the Hoyts popcorn flavour sachets would be any match for my MacGyvered microwave-popcorn-and-Easy-Mac-powder invention. Some other shit happens. Will Ted be proven to be a human being, or will [FART NOISE THAT ECHOES THROUGH ETERNITY]

???????

On the one hand, the film drops many noble references to anthropologist Dawn Prince-Hughes’ work on human consciousness; on the other, it directly compares the Emancipation Proclamation to an anthropomorphised teddy bear’s fight to be able to legally shtup his human wife.

Ted’s legal battle is clearly fashioned as a civil rights parable (it has the Dred Scott references to prove it), but the film features broad racial stereotypes and jokes about Ferguson and “homos”. Pick one, MacFarlane, or go harder; the majority of his “naughty” jokes are so sophomoric as to be completely stripped of any political frisson. And then there’s the moment when Ted watches a particularly agonising scene from Roots and draws a parallel between his own plight and Kunta Kinte’s.

Wahlberg gives a performance only barely more animated than his comatose work in The Happening, while the delightful Seyfried gamely gives it her all despite a cruel ongoing gag about how she, apparently, looks like Gollum. Imagine being negged by your own director.

It’s possible there were a few good jokes — as is a MacFarlane production’s wont, there were certainly occasional moments when I laughed loudly — but I could not recount any of them to you in great detail. They pass swiftly and the void they leave is quickly filled by dross, in case you got the wrong idea and thought this was actually a deft comedy.

This is also the sort of film, with its dick-shaped bongs and unfunny Jurassic Park-riffing gags about verdant fields of marijuana plants, that makes me ashamed to smoke weed.

??????? x 2

What is MacFarlane’s deal at this point?

Exactly what he thought he was conveying with this nearly two-hour film is a mystery: it grasps blindly in the direction of the sort of moral “gross-out fable” tropes that the Farrelly Brothers made their fortune from, but ends up completely tone deaf.

He fetishises the outsider experience (see: aforementioned Revenge Of The Nerds one-hit-wonders, Bone Symphony; Ted and John’s ongoing fight against The Man), but then subjects the viewer to a desperately unfunny and mean-spirited extended sequence at New York Comic-Con in which nerds are repeatedly abused. He serves up puerile dick jokes that fail to mask a palpably earnest yearning for musical comedy superstardom. He’s a very talented voice actor who writes himself appallingly drab dialogue.

The boundless dichotomies frustrate because it’s clear that MacFarlane is not, as his films would suggest, an idiot; the scattershot moments of genuinely incisive humour pass like fireflies in a fog. And I also can’t stop listening to One Foot In Front Of The Other, so I can’t argue with his taste in music.

In the end, Ted 2 isn’t even a hateable film: it’s just damnably average. And that’s something no measure of eye-gouging sexual fantasy can salvage.

–

Ted 2 is out now.

–

Clem Bastow is an award-winning writer and critic with a focus on popular culture, gender politics, mental health, and weird internet humour. She’s on Twitter at @clembastow