Movie review: Ted - Canada.com

The vulgar jokes push envelopes you didn’t know existed, but there’s a sweetness to the film, and it’s often very funny. 

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis

Rating: Three stars out of five

The funny thing about Ted â€" yet another comedy about a dopey man-boy who spends his days (and nights) puffing on his bong and watching old TV shows, a character who has taken up permanent residence in the finished basement of American culture â€" is that his best friend is a talking teddy bear.

This shouldn’t be funny, of course: it’s not only dopey, it’s coarse and repetitive. It’s just that when Ted, as the bear is called, begins to fulminate about, say, the post-coital behaviour of Boston girls (“now I’m gonna stuff my fâ€"in’ face with Pepperidge Farm”), it’s hard not to laugh because, well, a teddy bear is saying it. This is John and Ted’s excellent adventure.

John (Mark Wahlberg), the human in this relationship, is a 35-year-old man who, when he was eight, wished that his Christmas teddy would come to life. Now, 27 years later, he and the bear are the kind of roommates who make up new words for beer, or who comfort each other through thunderstorms with their childhood Thunder Buddies song that glories in its unabashed vulgarity. That’s not necessarily funny either, except when a teddy bear says it.

The bear is a marvellous construction, a walking and talking special effect that has the adorable face of Pooh and the vocabulary of, well, poo. He’s voiced by Seth MacFarlane, the director and co-writer, with a similar sense of blue-collar transgression of his animated TV show Family Guy; indeed, Ted sounds very much like Peter Griffin, the star of that show, and he has a similar throwaway tone of rude surrealism. In one scene, Ted gets dressed up in a suit so he can apply for a job he doesn’t want. “I look like Snuggle’s accountant,” he says with the slacker’s indolent insight.

Against all odds, John has a girlfriend, Lori (Mila Kunis) who â€" in the manner of all 30-something women in these relationships â€" is trying to drag her boyfriend into adulthood even as his unrefined friend (a teddy bear, in this case) conspires to keep him perpetually adolescent, not to mention perpetually stoned. She’s the kind of woman who has to bring home takeout for three and then gracefully put up with the wisecracks (“Turkeyburgers?” asks Ted from the couch. “Are we having homosexuals over for dinner?”) about her choices.

The triangle forms the plot of Ted, and under the obscene jokes â€" Ted sometimes pushes envelopes you didn’t know existed â€" is a surprisingly sweet love story. Lori wants John to start to take responsibility for his life and put aside childish things (literally). When John and Lori are together, they have a believable chemistry: you’re actually rooting for these people, and you sympathize with the pain that John feels as he tries to come to terms with his own childishness (“All I do is smoke pot and watch movies with a teddy fâ€"in’ bear.”) Wahlberg is essentially the straight man, but he has a few good comic moments, including a lightning fast list of trailer-trash girls’ names that’s a classic of cultural stereotyping, which is the least of the film’s worries.

The thin premise is thickened only slightly by a subplot involving Giovanni Ribisi as a creep who wants to buy Ted and give him to his own son. He’s after Ted because the bear was once famous; he’s positioned as a former celebrity who has grown up to substance abuse and failure.

“This is how the cast of Diff’rent Strokes feels,” Ted says as he takes a blue-collar job. There are many such cultural references, and several celebrity cameos. We’ve seen it all before, but seldom with such reckless abandon, and never with a teddy bear.

Jay Stone, Postmedia News