Prepare for weed jokes, hairy sight gags, unbridled misogyny, celebrity cameos, unchecked homophobia, Goose Island product placement, wiener jokes, sperm jokes, boob jokes, period jokes, Bud Lite product placement, lame-brained pop culture references, more weed jokes, mean-spirited black people jokes, more Goose Island product placement, slut shaming, nerd lampooning, Boston jokes, ASU jokes, and a near gleeful amount of hate because Ted 2, the somehow anticipated sequel to 2011’s near awful foul-mouthed CG teddy bear buddy comedy, is finally here. It is also, without a doubt, the worst film of the year.
This hair-brained sequel picks up where Ted left off, a conclusion that I’d squirreled away into the farthest reaches of my neural storage banks. If you’re being generous enough to consider what takes place in this film an actual “story” – rather than a seemingly infinite montage of rejected Family Guy jokes – one might say that Ted 2 attempts to craft its narrative into a statement about civil rights. But that’s like saying that Transformers: Age of Extinction was a meditation on man’s precarious position as the dominant species. Just for the record, it was about robot dinosaurs punching robot cars. Just as Ted 2 is about a foul-mouthed teddy bear who smokes pot and is a racist.
Now married to Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth) – who in her own right is a noxious double-Y chromosomed mockery of Jersey Shore proportion – Ted notes that things at home are on the rocks. Tables turn upside and shouting matches ensue on the reg. The air is thick with dysfunction so Ted and Tami-Lynn opt to have a baby. One might anticipate that the film earmarks this distressing page in the book of bad parenting 101 but, like a stoner one too many bong rips of Purple Cush deep, this rotten egg of an idea is forgotten about in mere minutes. And this is what it is to watch Ted 2.
Paired with loser friend Johnny (Mark Wahlberg), Ted goes on a quest to impregnate his big breasted bride. Their journey lands them ass-up, covered in jizz (unfortunately, I’m being literal) at the sperm bank or on the front of Tom Brady’s lawn lamenting the fact that they didn’t properly rape him in his sleep to steal his seed. Before long, Ted’s turn to an adoption clinic has the state questioning his status as a person. This lands him in the law office of Samantha (Amanda Seyfried), a PYT lawyer cutting her teeth with this unorthodox civil rights case. To get a sense of the narrative thrust of the film, Ted and Johnny only take Samantha on as a lawyer when she pops a bong out from under her desk mid-meeting and proceeds to rip it like a pair of Levis in a 40 meter dash. “I get migraines,” she says. In the audience, I groan, “Tell me about it.”
Because Ted 2 is like having your brain flayed. Not only are you exposed to a slew of horrid, rancid jokes that just don’t register anywhere on the funny dial, they bring them back ad-nasueam. They salt the wounds. A penis-shaped bong gets minutes of screen time. Let me allow this to sink in: minutes of my life were dedicated to bad jokes about a penis-shaped bong. The horror… The horror. Worse yet, Ted 2 feels as if it will never end. Only 30 minutes into the film, I checked my watch, assuming it all might be over soon. You can understand my all but disappearing into my seat as the film stretched (almost impossibly) to almost two hours.
Two hours of anything is a long time but when the product is this ADHD in terms of its flow, the film transforms into a storytelling torture mechanism. Ted 2 slips between dumb non-sequiturs and hateful, unfunny jokes at the expense of non-white-males so often and with such carelessness that to even dare engage with it is an exercise in futility. It’s simply an overlong, abysmal, unoriginal, scuzzy, abhorrent, abomination of a comedy movie; a coup de grâce of tastelessness and baseness.
It did have moments where I couldn’t help but laugh but that fact doesn’t even broach excusing the 700 other times when I did not; those multiple times when I slapped my head in my hands and sighed audibly or cussed outloud about how much I hated this movie (ask Drew Powell, who was seated next to me. I just couldn’t hold back the gates.) And even those few fleeting “funny” moments only come from Ted 2’s internal sense of meanness. One character in particular is made fun of because of her unflattering resemblance to a Lord of the Ring’s creature. Though my chortle was one of recognition, I still couldn’t divorce just how downright mean McFarlane’s material was, if just for a throwaway laugh. As someone who loves good comedy, I want to note that I’m not coming from a place of PC policing or drawing a line in the sacred cow sand. It’s just bad, lazy comedy; both singularly dumb and totally dickish.
To its credit, my theater was roaring so loud with laughter that my fillings were rattling. Me? I’d say there was one funny scene (involving Liam Neeson and Lucky Charms) and 107 extra minutes of the comedic equivalent of smut. And perhaps I’ll land on my own private island in my utter detestation of this ugly, ugly film but I pray that’s not the case. We’re better than this people. We really are.
In order to drill home the point, know that Ted 2 is in fact a cinematic urinal cake; a patchwork of unfunny, hateful jokes bred with a razor thin attempt to tap into the zeitgeist with a terribly executed civil rights suit. The only thing that could have made it worse is if I had brought a guest to the film. I don’t believe there would be enough words in the English language to express my guilt had I made another human experience such a a titanic turd of filmmaking. Those who’ve already bought their tickets may be better off stepping in front of a car instead of stepping into the theater.
F
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