Typical Family Guy Writing...

Rating: 5/10 (3 May 2013)

For every genuinely funny joke you have to sit through ten minutes of pointlessness. Then you've got the generic over the top fight scenes which they seem obsessed with and piles of pop culture references which are just pop culture references... without any attempt to turn them into proper jokes. Same with all the bizarre celebrity namedropping. The film even ends on one as if that is the lasting memory it wishes to instil in its audience.
The opening five minutes is probably the best part of the film and the narration works very well, but after that it is mostly a downward spiral of drivel. The initial premise is fantastic but it was fairly predictable where it would go from there and a lot of the scenes just feel like filler.
There are a few genuinely hilarious lines. The exchanges with the grocery shop owner and the Flash Gordon bits are great... it's just a shame it gets buried under a mountain of mediocrity and a stock plot. Also they totally failed to play Queen's wedding march from Flash Gordon at the end...
The writers need to realise that just because one of the characters is a talking teddy bear... everything it says does not turn to gold. The dialogue that works especially well is when it is actually in relation to him being a teddy bear. Writing angry letters to Hasbro about having no penis for instance is something which can only work in this film, and indeed works well. So much of the rest however is just very generic stoner/buddy film lines which have nothing to do with him being a bear. They would not be funny when delivered by a human and just because he happens to be stuffed and furry... they do not suddenly become so.
There is a certain amount of humour to be mined from portraying a children's character in an adult theme and parodying the endless well of 'lonely child befriends an alien/toy/talking animal' films from the 90s (I really need a better name for that)... but it quickly gets old. I feel you could edit out a good thirty minutes of content from this film without actually losing anything. That is never a good sign.
Paul is a film with a similar premise and target audience which ultimately delivers far more effectively and does not disappoint.