Alternate title – Seth McFarland owes me $22 for the cost of my tickets.

Let me preface this by saying that I didn’t go into this movie expecting high art.  I’ve seen enough of McFarland’s work on TV to know that his humor is low-brow, but I enjoyed it enough to think I would enjoy the movie.

Yeah, maybe not so much.

Plot Summary – At Christmas 1985, an 8-year-old boy gets a teddy bear as a present.  The teddy bear magically comes to life and is his friend forever.  Flash forward almost three decades and “Ted” is a threadbare loser who crashes on the now 35 year old’s couch, helps him get in trouble for blowing off work to get high and watch “Flash Gordon”, and gets in the way of him doing adult things like having a serious girlfriend.  Throw in a few twists and a predictable villain, and that’s about it.  By the end of the movie, the main human character learns a valuable life lesson, gets the girl, and the loser friend is still a part of his life.

If that plot sounds familiar, it ought to.  But in this case, it doesn’t work half as well as that cineturd did.  Seriously, when I say that a Jack Black movie was better than your picture, you have seriously missed the mark.  It’s a bromance movie with a CGI teddy bear, and a pretty poor one at that.  Honestly, if you haven’t figured this out 1/4 of the way through the movie, you need to stop hitting the bong.  People might think you’re slow.

One other issue I had with the plot was the pacing.  The film clocked in at just shy of two hours, and that’s way too long for the premise.  Basically, you had the first half hour with plot exposition and character development and the last half hour with telling the end of the story.  That hour in between was pretty much scene after scene of “guy done messed up and his girlfriend is pissed”.  Taking about 30 minutes of that out would have made this movie a bit more engaging and wouldn’t have detracted from the story.

Of course, I have to talk about the humor.  If you’ve watched McFarland’s work on television, you know what you’re in for with this one: fart and poop jokes, crude sexual, drug, racial, and whatever category references, and pratfalls.  Don’t get me wrong, some of the jokes worked really well, even if you take away the shock factor.  The problem is that they are laced together with scene after scene of attempts to be humorous or smart that fail.  Basically, take the jokes that work from “Family Guy” and “American Dad”, remove the FCC censors, and pad them with 90 minutes of the jokes that didn’t work, and that’s the humor in “Ted”.

One bright spot in this was the acting.  The main human character is played by Mark Wahlberg, and he does a great job playing a 35-year-old man-child from Boston who desperately wants more in life than sitting on the couch, getting high, and watching “Flash Gordon”, but still wants to sit on the couch, get high, and watch “Flash Gordon”.  Mila Kunis plays his girlfriend, and to be honest, her character was my favorite in the movie.  She’s the only normal one in the entire cast. There are minor parts and cameos done by other actors I like, and they all play their parts very well, even if they are cardboard cutouts from the “Let’s Make a Movie” coloring book.  Heck, even the CGI bear, voiced by McFarland, has good moments.

I can’t say that I recommend this movie.  It might be funnier if I wasn’t sober when I see it, but to be honest, it wouldn’t be that much funnier.  Unfortunately, I can’t tell you to wait for it to be on late night cable, because in order to get it over the airwaves, the censors would cut it down to a 10 minute short.  Save your money and see something else.