Ted,
the foulmouthed teddy bear (once again voiced by director Seth MacFarlane) is
back. This time out, he and his
girlfriend Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth) want to have a baby. Naturally, the assholes in the government step
in and nix the idea, saying Ted can’t adopt because he’s not a person. Ted and his best pal John (Marky Mark) take
their case to a sexy stoner lawyer (Amanda Seyfried) who tries to get the
courts to recognize Ted’s duly entitled personhood.
The
first Ted was good, but what do you do when the novelty of a swearing
pot-smoking teddy bear wears off? Send
Marky Mark to a sperm donor clinic where he accidentally falls into a shelf
full of sperm samples and winds up covered in semen specimens? Yeah, that sounds about right.
The
film is full of the kind of gags and non sequiturs you’d expect from MacFarlane.
We have Jay Leno hunting for sex in
bathrooms, Liam Neeson attempting to buy a box of Trix, and Marky Mark trying
to jerk off Tom Brady. All this just seems
like leftover bits from an episode of Family Guy.
You
can always tell when a filmmaker has been given carte blanche by the studio to
do whatever the hell he wants when he puts a Busby Berkeley musical number in
there for no good reason whatsoever. The
problem is, Macfarlane forgot to make it funny. It’s as if he thought the sight of a teddy
bear dancing on top of a giant wedding cake would be enough.
The
jokes are hit and miss. (There’s one bit
that’s straight out of Three Amigos.) Admittedly, there are some laughs here. However, there’s just not quite enough of
them to push this one in the win column.
The
plot is equally scattershot. The movie
pretty much throws its hands up in the air by the end. The big brawl at Comic Con where nerds in
cosplay fight one another is particularly weak.
Again, it’s all set-up with no punchline.
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