Essentially a straightforward rom-com, but with an original central joke

Rating: 8/10 (10 August 2012)

When he is 8, John is given a teddy bear for Christmas. He wishes for it to come to life so that they could be friends forever, and his wish comes true. Skip forward 27 years and, after a brief brush with celebrity, Ted is now a dope-smoking foul-mouthed slacker and, still living with John, constantly lures him into this aimless unfocused lifestyle - after all, they are best buddies for ever, right? Lori, John's girlfriend of four years, has other ideas, however.
This film's one original idea is that one of the central trio of characters is a teddy bear, and to see a teddy bear effing and blinding and smoking a bong is funny. Strip away that element (and cast, say, Seth Rogen) and you have a fairly routine rom-com where a long-suffering girl is trying to extract her boyfriend from the clutches of his bad influence best friend.
However, the joke is quite a good one and sustains a moderate amount of the length of the film. Ted (voiced by Seth Macfarlane, who also wrote, directed, and performed Temotion capture), for all his slackerhood, remains a fairly endearing character, as do Mark Wahlberg as the adult John and Mila Kunis as Lori. There is sufficient going on to keep the interest going - silly subplots featuring Sam Jones' Flash Gordon movie, and Giovanni Ribisi as an unhinged father and would-be toy kidnapper augment the central plot.
The realisation of Ted is superb.
I could have done without quite so much drug use, and a bit less bad language. Conversely, I loved the fight between John and Ted - vicious, in the way that fights between people who love each other very much yet who are hurting each other a great deal can be, but also very funny, and I also loved Patrick Stewart's fairy story narration bookends: absolutely faithful to how such narration is delivered, yet knowingly, wickedly, hilariously subversive.