Teddy's too tame

Rating: Null/10 (21 July 2012)

Seth MacFarlane, creator of "Family Guy", directs "Ted", an unfunny comedy which pairs actor Mark Wahlberg with a foul mouthed, CGI teddy bear. The film's trying to humorously clash its wholesome, Christmas miracle plot with R rated humour, but all of its jokes fall flat. This type of juxtaposition is routinely done better in "South Park", the "Family Guy" specials, Kevin Smith's flicks, or films like "Bad Santa", "The Big Lebowski" and even junk like "Harold and Kumar 3".
Our heroes are a couple of weed smoking slackers, but their plot takes a slow ten minutes to get going. When it does, the result is mostly a string of clichés, and none of our duo's antics are as funny or outlandish as even the worst stoner comedies. The film has one good joke in which our heroes discuss whether or not its offensive to invite Jews to a party, the assumption being that specifying that Jews are allowed is itself anti-Semitic. Most of MacFarlane's jokes, however, aren't rude enough, extreme enough, weird enough or smart enough to keep up with the cutting edge of today's humour.
Mark Wahlberg's an underrated actor. In "Ted" he essentially plays the same character he did in "The Other Guys", a funnier comedy which saw him playing a wounded, doe-eyed and bizarrely earnest guy. Mark makes "Ted" bearable.
Like the "South Park" crew – Trey Parker and Matt Stone - MacFarlane seems to have difficulties transferring his brand of humour, which is typically more hyper-intensified than live-action comedy, to live-action movies. He tries to make Ted as "realistic" and "three dimensional" as everything else in his film, instead of making the film itself as flat as Ted (ie a cartoon). This was the problem Parker and Stone struggled with in their early live-action comedies, most of which were unwatchable, until they ditched actors altogether in favour of cartoonish marionettes and puppets.
4/10 - Worth one viewing.