The biggest surprise with the first Ted film wasn’t that it was funny – writer / director Seth MacFarlane’s scattershot approach to comedy (as seen in Family Guy and American Dad) might not hit every target every time, but he sprays around enough jokes to ensure everybody’s going to laugh at something – but that it was an actual coherent story.
Unfortunately, the return adventure of everyone’s favourite magically animated potty-mouthed teddy bear is much more of a patch-up job than the first film, feeling more often than not like a big screen version of Family Guy down to the cut-away jokes and bits that lack even a basic ending – let alone a punchline.
The film begins with Ted (voiced by MacFarlane) marrying his long-time girlfriend Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth), only when their relationship rapidly goes downhill Ted figures the solution is to have a baby. His former owner (Mark Wahlberg), who’s even more dim-witted this time around, presumably because of his unfunny depression over his failed marriage, decides to help out. Cue much hilarity at a sperm bank – only when he turns to adoption there’s a catch: it turns out that Ted isn’t legally a person, and trying to adopt has brought this to the attention of the authorities. The rest of the story involves Ted’s various court battles to be legally recognised as a human – yes, it’s a Civil Rights struggle – which are largely treated as filler between various jokes about smoking dope, blind people’s butt cracks, various bodily fluids, and… well, you get the idea.
It’s still funny in parts (the strike rate sketch-wise is roughly one good one out of three) and the celebrity material works more often than not (Liam Neeson has a hilariously intense scene involving buying cereal), but it’s still just a bunch of jokes thrown together rather than an actual film. So unless you really want to see a lot of big-screen bong-smoking, feel free to wait a few months for all the best bits to appear on YouTube.