The foul-mouthed teddy bear is back – and fighting for all of our civil rights
Back in 2012, Seth Macfarlane’s stoner comedy about a grown man’s ongoing friendship with his talking-and-walking teddy bear felt like the last word on the kind of raucous man-child comedies that tend to clog up the release schedule. Making a pretty on-the-nose statement about a generation that has collectively refused to leave behind its childhood obsessions, it didn’t suggest much scope for a sequel beyond simply regurgitating the same entertainingly crude jokes that arise when building a film around a profanity spewing toy who smokes pot with his best friend, sleeps with hookers and does coke with the star of Flash Gordon. The first thing to say about Ted 2, then, is that while it’s just as juvenile, just as foul-mouthed and, crucially, just as funny as the original – providing, of course, you find all of the aforementioned things funny (and
I laughed like a drain during both films) – the film does actually serve up a surprisingly worthwhile plot as Ted (voiced again by Macfarlane) becomes embroiled in a legal battle to protect his civil rights.
This happens after Ted and his Boston hellcat girlfriend Tammylynn (Jessica Barth) get hitched and decide to have a baby to paper over the cracks of their rapidly deteriorating relationship. That neither have the requisite reproductive capabilities to have kids leads them to try an adoption agency – although not before investigating the possibility of artificial insemination. Naturally, Macfarlane mines the latter for a number of gross-out set-pieces that are funny in a way that make you feel ashamed for laughing so hard. But when the adoption flags up a bigger problem for Ted by drawing attention to his legal status as “property” not a “person”, Macfarlane turns the film into an exuberant, expletive-filled metaphor for the sorts of civil liberties issues surrounding everything from gay marriage to slavery. That he has the cajones to do this is part of the film’s outlandish appeal; his offend-everysensibility approach to comedy makes its own points about the need for tolerance without stretching the metaphor to breaking point.
He’s also good at finding humour in weird pop culture references and getting comedic performances out of his up for it cast. Returning as Ted’s best friend John – who is newly divorced and doubting his ability to meet the right woman after marrying the wrong one at the end of the first film – Mark Wahlberg is once again consistently hilarious and Amanda Seyfried (as Ted’s potsmoking lawyer) proves a good sport as she faces a stream of endless, though not inaccurate, Gollum comparisons.