One thing I noticed about Ted 2 that I have never noticed
with a Seth MacFarlane film before was the similarities, in terms of production
style, to Family Guy. There were at
least a couple of the trademark non-sequitur cut away scenes and the long
exterior establishing shots of buildings were very prevalent. There were also a few jokes taken right out
of previous Family Guy episodes. I don’t
consider this a positive or negative for the film, I just thought it was
interesting and worth mentioning.
The
movie opens with Ted getting married to Tami-Lynn. Everybody is happy. Predictably, the
happiness does not last too long. When
the odd couple starts to have problems in their marriage, they decide the
answer is to adopt a child. (Ted cannot
father a child the natural way for obvious reasons.) In order to do this, they must first go to
court and prove that Ted is, in fact, a person.
I found
the argument about whether or not Ted is a person to be quite interesting. The movie does a good job of bringing up good
points for both sides and putting legitimate opposition in the way of the main
characters. What really does define a
person? That is a question that is worth
debating and this movie does that in an intelligent and interesting way.
MacFarlane’s
screenplay is well-structured but far from perfect. There is a major subplot that emerges that
should have been the main plot of the film.
All the marital drama between Ted and Tami-Lynn was ridiculous and
should have been left out completely. The movie also goes about five or ten minutes
too long. There was a point at the end
where Ted appears to learn something and the movie actually makes a decent
point. All the stuff that happens after
that however makes it completely irrelevant.
There is also a very stupid joke at the end that I could have done
without.
There
is no denying the fact that this movie is very funny. I would call it the funniest movie of the year,
in fact. The vast majority of the jokes
really hit. There are a ton of pop
culture references and cameos that are all on point. A particularly clever cameo by Liam Neeson was
one of my favorite scenes in the film. The
climax of the movie takes place at Comic Con.
This was a brilliant idea because it allowed MacFarlane to just go wild
with the pop culture references and all of them are funny and work very
well.
Dear
Hollywood, please put Amanda Seyfried in more stuff. She was phenomenal in this movie. She was actually better than the movie
required for the role she played. All of
the acting is good. The chemistry
between Mark Wahlberg and Seth MacFarlane is tremendous once again. I wouldn’t say Seyfried stole the show
exactly, because Ted is undoubtedly the star, but she definitely gave the best
overall performance.
As was
to be expected, this movie is not as good as the first Ted. That being said, it is a perfectly adequate
sequel. I enjoyed watching it. I actually watched it twice. It is the funniest movie I’ve seen this year
and if you are a fan of pop culture humor this is your thing. However problems with the plot hold this
movie back from being as good as it actually could have been. The Movie Man gives it 3 out of 5 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment