Film Friday: Ted (2012)

Ted sucks. I could stop the review right there and that would sum up Seth McFarlane’s film pretty well. But I watched this turd and I want my pound of flesh. So I’m doing a full review to tell you exactly where Mr. McFarlane went wrong.

Plot

Ted is a “fairy tale gone crooked” about a boy who wishes that his teddy bear was real and gets his wish. Instead of being a touching story about a little boy who finds a special friend who teaches him some lesson, the story focuses on what happens after the boy and the bear both grow up and become typical Boston racist potheads. That’s the joke... all two hours of it. The plot, which is filler in this case, centers around the “difficult” choice the boy (Mark Wahlberg) must make between becoming something less than a total ass so he can keep his girlfriend (Mila Kunis) or sticking with his dope smoking, trouble causing bear. You can figure out the rest – boy loses girl, boy gets girl back with a “one last chance” proviso, boy loses girl when he abandons her at a business function so he can attend cocaine party with bear, contrived kidnapping-of-bear subplot brings boy and girl back together. Pathetic.

Why This Film Sucked Haard

This film stunk. Essentially, it was a vehicle for McFarlane to remind you repeatedly of the concept of the film and to relive his childhood. None of it worked. Observe:

● Seth McFarlane Director: McFarlane wrote, produced and directed this film himself. That’s usually a sign of trouble, as proven here again. As a director, McFarlane simply isn’t any good and producer McFarlane should have canned him. He had no sense of how to convey the story with the camera. Outside of maybe two scenes where Ted acts lewdly, there is nothing in the visuals of this film to tell you what is going on; it’s just a collection of shots of people standing around. And in many shots, the actors were too far beyond the field of vision to pull you in to give the scene much meaning. They were lost in the shot. Moreover, every... single... gag ran twice as long as it should have. Thus, you keep finding yourself saying, “Yes, I get it, now move on.”

● Seth McFarlane Writer: The writing was horrible too. Putting aside the jokes for the moment, what I’m talking about is the characters, the plot and the dialog. The plot, what little there is of it, is pathetically weak. It’s “below formula” in its sophistication, and it exists mainly to set up the comedic situations we’re supposed to laugh at. The characters are deeply unlikable and totally cardboard. You can’t feel for them. If they were all suddenly mowed down by a garbage truck, your response would have been to feel hopeful that we would now follow the intrinsically more likable garbage truck. Wahlberg’s Boston-trash pothead tries to get around being a genuine ass by constantly telling the audience he wants to be better than he is and by acting cute about his misbehavior. It doesn’t wash. Kunis is wallpaper. I don’t even recall if she speaks. The relationship scenes between them were written at the fifth grade level: “Ha ha, you’re hot, which is why I like you. I just farted.” I kid you not. Ted himself is interesting, because he does unexpected things, but he’s not likable. He’s a racist, a misogynist and a waster. And the only reason he seems likeable is because he’s been designed to look harmless and because all the other characters claim to like him. Cast Biff from Back to the Future instead of a CGI bear and audiences would have hated him. Seth McFarlane the producer should have fired McFarlane the writer too.

● Seth McFarlane Joke Maker: All of the above could be forgiven if this movie had you rolling in the aisles. But it doesn’t. You laugh for the intro, then the laughing stops. Sure, there are some individual jokes that make you laugh, but the frequency is very low. What McFarlane is doing is basically writing the dialog using the following pattern: fart joke / racist joke / fart joke / dope joke / gay joke / creepy guy moment. He then mixes these with a constant stream of references to things McFarlane watched on television growing up and celebrity cameos. And he separates all lines with swearing. That’s his formula. And it’s tiring.

Even worse, as has become the norm among so many modern comedians, it’s all mean-spirited. All the jokes are aimed at other people and then the punch line is them acting helpless to respond to the insult. At one point, Ted even pretends to be mentally retarded after a life threatening injury just to watch Walhberg look on with horror. Very funny. There’s a manager who bizarrely thinks that being insulted is grounds for promotion – that’s nonsense. There are a number of characters who are too dumb to realize they’ve been insulted. There’s a businessman who nonsensically screams in a restaurant about his dinner being ruined because “[he’s] a businessman” and “someone farted!” And so on.

Moreover, if you’re going to make controversial jokes (e.g. jokes involving racism, religious bigotry, gays, the disabled), you better make sure you make good ones. McFarlane doesn’t. “Thank you for 9/11,” said to an Hispanic woman Ted has wrongly called a Muslim is not funny. A Chinese man with a duck screaming gibberish is not funny. Making a Brandon Routh was a gay Superman joke is not funny seven years after the film ended. The problem is McFarlane lacks courage -- his targets throughout the film are Hollywood has-beens and long-dead controversies. If you want to tell a racist joke, you need to accept the fact someone will get upset. That means you pick a side and you tell it; you either make fun of the racists, as Blazing Saddles does, or you speak some truth that is normally off limits, as many stand-ups do (Chris Rock: “Books is like Kryptonite to n*ggas.”). What you cannot do is what McFarlane does, which is suggest a racist joke, but then make it clear that he doesn’t really mean anything by it. That just makes people wonder why you brought it up in the first place.

The perfect example of this is when Ted suggests they will one day open an Italian restaurant but insists they allow Jews to dine there. This seems like the beginning of an anti-Semitic joke of some sort. . . but it’s not. Instead, Wahlberg responds, “Of course we would, why wouldn’t we?” and Ted then acts embarrassed for bringing it up. The joke stops cold. So what is the joke? It sounds like a joke about Italian anti-Semitism, but it’s not. We know this because Wahlberg responds in a shocked way, which suggests Ted is the one being racist. But Ted is trying to be anti-racist, so that doesn’t work either. In the end, what you get is “Ted wrongly thinks Wahlberg is anti-Semitic because he’s Italian.” That’s not funny, nor does it make a lot of sense. Perhaps if Ted had been openly anti-Semitic, then it would have made sense. Or if it exposed some truth about Italians or Jews or both, then it would have made sense. But it doesn’t. It ultimately makes no point at all. In fact, the only reason I can see for this joke is that McFarlane wants to trick the audience into thinking he’s being “edgy” by suggesting anti-Semitic jokes. All of his “edgy” jokes are like this: aimed at the wrong people, never actually insulting, and only suggestive of some bigotry. It’s symptomatic of a man who lacks the courage to say anything daring.

Indeed, just as Dennis Miller makes himself seem erudite by referencing things everyone knows but rarely discuss in daily conversations (rather than referencing things average people might not know), McFarlane makes himself seem edgy by suggesting that he’s telling racist, sexist, etc.-ist jokes, but doing so in a way that never actually lands a punch.

This is the problem with this film. You have a funny concept that McFarlane doesn’t know how to exploit. Rather than making a story involving Ted or the relationship between Ted and Wahlberg, he makes a stoner comedy with mean-spirited, cowardly jokes, unlikable characters, and a worthless plot. And he wraps all of this in enough fart/scat jokes to make you wonder if a twelve year old didn’t write the thing.

Totally... wasted... idea.