The background
The story of a foul-mouthed talking teddy bear has achieved the highest opening weekend for an R-rated comedy, taking $54.1 million on its debut. Ted stars Mark Wahlberg as a man sharing his life with a teddy bear he brought to life through a childhood wish, to the exasperation of his girlfriend (Mila Kunis). The film is directed and co-written by Seth Family Guy MacFarlane.
The indie hit topped the US box office at the end of June 2012, and is predicted to pull in more cinema-goers as America’s long holiday weekend draws close. So what’s all the fuss about?
Smarter than average
Admittedly, Ted revels in cheap, vulgar gags at times, wrote Andrew O’Hehir at Salon, but compared to many Hollywood comedies, this movie is almost sophisticated. ”Its funniest gags are verbal or conceptual, it winks at the audience without betraying its essentially likable characters, and it pulls a startlingly high proportion of laughs without ever making fun of fat women or gay people or going deep into toilet humour,” O’Hehir said.
Perfect for overgrown adolescents
“I can’t think of a better movie to see if you’re male and want to get high and relive your idiot adolescence,” said David Edelstein at New York Magazine’s Vulture. Admittedly, said Edelstein, some viewers will ”find its rote smuttiness, sexism, racism, homophobia, and fart jokes unendurable”. But if your idea of fun is watching a teddy bear “do bong hits and bang hookers”, this is the film for you.
Some funny bits, but mainly dull
“There are some genuinely, wildly funny bits in the movie,” wrote A.O. Scott in The New York Times, but these are to enough to make up for the film’s shortcomings. “The sin of ‘Ted’ is not that it is offensive but that it is boring, lazy and wildly unoriginal,” Scott said, arguing that many of the jokes are only “funny” because they come out of the mouth of a stuffed bear, and are not intrinsically amusing in themselves.
Watch the trailer for Ted below. Warning: Strong language from the start.