Seth MacFarlane’s feature-film directing debut mines two of his favorite devices: anthropomorphism and ’80s pop culture. In Family Guy we got a talking dog; in American Dad, a talking fish (and an alien); in The Cleveland Show, a family of talking bears. Now, in Ted, we get another talking bear. It goes without saying that MacFarlane voices all of them, blending outsider commentary with the tics of whatever creature’s spouting it. And as for the ’80s pop-culture references, well, MacFarlane’s spent nearly two decades mocking one.
Ted’s ostensibly a coming-of-age story about 30-something John Bennett’s (Mark Wahlberg) choice between a normal, adult life with his girlfriend Lori (Mila Kunis) and his pot-smoking, hard-drinking state of arrested development, represented and enabled by his talking teddy bear. However, maybe because it’s a comedy or whether it’s MacFarlane’s ego, the film has no interest whatsoever in its human characters .
So much so that two of the three main subplots — Ted getting a job at the local supermarket and Ted getting stalked by a deranged fan (Giovanni Ribisi) revolve, naturally, around Ted. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because every time the scene shifts from Ted to Wahlberg and Kunis, it’s like a symphony of chalkboard scrapers and wailing cats led by Dully McMyBrainIsOnFire.
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