When Seth MacFarlane jumped from making animated TV series to directing his first live action feature with Ted back in 2012, there were a lot of questions surrounding how successful he would be. His crass, pop-culture obsessed humor was divisive, had arguably been run into the ground through years of Family Guy and American Dad reruns, and nobody knew whether or not he could handle shooting live action. Ted turned out to be a really strong debut though. The hit to miss ratio of the jokes outclassed what was happening on his series at the time, and the guy proved to be adept at blocking and shooting scenes in a way that felt comfortingly like old Hollywood. One could even have argued that his visual style elevated the material. His second film, A Million Ways to Die in the West, was awful though, so now this new sequel to Ted is debuting with just as many questions surrounding its quality as the original.
Happily, Ted 2 is, in most ways, a pretty spot-on continuation of what MacFarlane was doing with the original. Its story is about Ted needing to legally prove that he’s a person so that he can get married, but that’s not what’s important here. This is a Ted movie. What’s important is if it’s funny. The strengths of the first film, which mostly lied in the chemistry between Mark Wahlberg and the CG bear and a skin-crawling villain turn from Giovanni Ribisi, are all brought back, the joke writing is nearly as strong as it was in the original, and overall the thing is funny enough consistently enough to keep you engaged throughout. So it’s got that stuff going for it.
MacFarlane as a performer is must less annoying voicing animated characters like Ted rather than appearing as himself like he did in A Million Ways to Die in the West, so he doesn’t play as a distraction here. Mark Wahlberg is at his best when he’s playing the overly-sincere fool like he does here, so making Ted movies is basically his wheelhouse defined. Amanda Seyfried replaces Mila Kunis as the main love interest in this sequel, and she’s a more than welcome addition to the property because she understands that the key to delivering offensive, absurdist material like this is to play things completely straight. Thanks to a strong primary cast, the sweetness to the primary relationships that made the more offensive material in Ted palatable is still on full display here. Plus, there are a number of fun cameos that manage to add a little sizzle to that steak.
Even though it’s funny, Ted 2 is still a movie that has just as many strengths as it does weaknesses though. MacFarlane has always leaned too heavily on easy race-baiting or gender issues-baiting jokes to get cheap laughs, and if his approach was starting to feel stale when Ted was first released, it’s doubly so now. There are some legitimately clever quips sprinkled throughout this film, and it makes you wish that he’d protect that accomplishment by cutting out all of the easy jokes whose punchlines are essentially, “A Teddy Bear is saying something offensive, isn’t that outrageous?” Even in a climate where edgy humor was de rigueur, his sense of which jokes are transcendently naughty and which are just tediously rude was always a bit skewed, so he’d probably do well to search for a different schtick now that we’re living in a climate where boundary-pushing humor is very much not in style. Does he have any other approaches in his arsenal? Clearly he’s got a love of old school movie musicals, so why doesn’t he make an earnest attempt at making one of those that doesn’t lean on the crutch of easy shock humor? It could really rehabilitate his image.
Much like the first Ted, this sequel goes too far in trying to create high-stakes drama and emotional pathos that no one was ever going to buy into in its third act as well. That movie put a stupid CG Teddy Bear in life and death situations and asked us to care about his mortality, which was ridiculous enough, but this one goes a step further by not only putting his life in danger, but also asking us to ponder the existential truths about whether or not a toy bear who achieves sentience is actually alive. Like, we spend a lot of time on this stuff. Give me a break. There’s just too much story here, too much setup in the first act, too much going on in the third, and the film starts too feel too long as a result. This is a movie about a foul-mouthed, beer-swilling, weed-smoking bear. Getting in, making some jokes, and then getting the heck out would have probably been a good strategy. Ted 2 mostly feels like more Ted, but it’s just a little bit shaggier and less fresh in nearly every way.
