TED 2 (2015) FILM REVIEW 7-5-2015
Months after John’s divorce, Ted and Tami-Lynn’s marriage seems on the same road. To patch things up, Ted and Tami-Lynn plan to have a child with John’s help, but their failed efforts backfire disastrously. Namely, Ted is declared property by the government and he loses all his civil rights. Now, Ted must fight a seemingly hopeless legal battle with an inexperienced young lawyer to regain his rightful legal status. Unfortunately, between Ted’s drunken idiocies and sinister forces interested in this situation to exploit him, Ted’s quest has all the odds against him…Written by Kenneth Chisholm ([email protected])…IMBD.com
7-5-2015 – Written By: David L. $Money Train$ Watts – Journalist/Film Reviewer FuTurXTV & HHBMedia.com – David Velo Stewart – Editor – www.hiphopbattle.com
Ted 2 (2015) is basically a horrible and blatantly racist sequel to Ted (2012), but I am sure Ted 2’s director/writer/producer Seth MacFarlane could care less about mine or anyone’s feelings toward his weak, punk ass #LegalizeTed talking teddy bear film. I did not have a visceral and bad reaction to Ted as I did to Ted 2 – even though I am sure there were many non-PC or funny racist-themed jokes. And that is the point with me about racial or ethnic humor—it has to be, for me, based on an urban legend or myth, an actual true fact or even a real event/person. That was not the case with Ted 2.
First, we get okay and semi-funny jokes between Johnny (Mark Wahlberg) and Ted (voiced by Seth MacFarlane) talking about how much porn Johnny has been watching on his laptop since he got divorced from Lori Collins (Mila Kunis), who is missed from Ted. Johnny’s excuse to having seen or downloaded so much porn is that every time you search for anything on Google, photos or videos of Black dicks/cocks show up. That particular joke felt real flat and seemed like it came out of nowhere. There are some more inappropriate and unfunny Black dick/cock gags later in the film when Ted searches for something on his smartphone and says that a photo of a Black dick appeared.
Next we had a stereotypical, overweight and loud Black women cashier Joy (Cocoa Brown) at Ted’s supermarket yelling at some white customers by referring to them as “white niggers”. The term “white niggers” is some made up bullshit that no one is saying right now, and if they did they would say a played out 90’s word like “wiggers”. But I am sure Seth wanted to get away with saying niggers by just adding “white” in front of it. Just because non-PC jokes might be censored or edited out of Seth’s “Family Guy” or “American Dad” on Fox does not mean that it is appropriate for him to use on Ted 2. There was also a dumb joke that Joy made about property and slavery in saying, “You better ask my ancestors. One minute you in Africa. You in the river washing your clothes. Titties just hanging! Next thing you know you getting fucked by Thomas Jefferson.”
Ted has no real Black friends and even Joy only just used as a Black-faced prop, whose only purpose in the film is to show up at Ted’s job to make some racist jokes.
What finally broke the straw for me with Ted 2 only 20 minutes into the film was when Johnny and Ted went to a fertility clinic. Johnny is supposed to donate his sperm, so Ted and Tami-Lyn (Jessica Barth) could have a baby to raise. So, of course when I saw Ted go into a room where the clinic stored sperm from donors I automatically knew that the sperm samples would get spilled or mixed up. And sure enough, on cue, Johnny and Ted start screwing around and predictably, Johnny trips and several shelves stacked with semen samples spill all over Johnny. Let’s skip the obvious and stupid fact that all sperm samples would have to be stored in a refrigerated or frozen locker. No way would jars of fresh sperm just be stored out on open racks during the day.
As if that wasn’t mad enough, what really tore it for me was that Seth MacFarlane thought it would be really jaw-breaking funny to have a white nurse come in and tell Johnny that the sperm he is covered in is not from normal white people, like himself, but rather the sperm were rejects from Black donors that tested positive for sickle cell disease. Now, Ted is even laughing harder at Johnny because he is covered in Black male sperm. There could never be enough Black sperm donors in Boston, the East Coast or the USA to have an abundant amount of samples, and not destroy them right away, just so we could have another dumb ass racist joke about Black dicks.
There was also an off-hand moronic, lazy joke that Johnny “now had so much Black sperm on, or in, him he could be a Kardashian”.
So at this point I just stopped taking Ted 2 seriously as a comedic film – it was on shaky grounds concept-wise in the first place. There was one a kinda funny, race joke about Ted’s lawyer and Johnny’s new girlfriend Samantha (Amanda Seyfried) having the same name spelled out as Samuel L. Jackson. Samantha then admitted to not knowing who SLJ was and Ted and Johnny replied saying that “Samuel was the designated Black guy in every big movie”. That played out joke was widely burned up on the Ted 2 trailer, so it was not a surprise or actually that funny in the moment.
Another racist aspect of Ted 2 were the constant references to Ted being declared a real person and not property by using the same legal arguments that abolitionists used to get Blacks their freedom from slavery with Emancipation and the 13th and 14th Amendments. To further insult the injury,Ted gets a highly prominent African-American lawyer, Patrick Melghan (Morgan Freeman), to win the same identical case that Samantha could not win.
The only note-worthy part of Ted 2 is the fact that they shot some of it at the New York Comic-Con. However, once again this is the wrong setting to believe that a living teddy bear would not be mobbed by geeks, fanboys and Cosplay artists to take selfies with.
What worked well in Ted 2, was the novelty and random weirdness of suddenly seeing a talking teddy bear thinking for itself. By the time Ted has arrived at the New York Comic-Con, he is already a highly recognized national celebrity because of his high profile trial to establish his existence and rights. Seth went out of his way to call in a lot of celebrity cameos from late night and SNL to show how widely Ted’s trial was being discussed and mocked in public, and the fact that Ted was now a mega-faux celebrity would help him. It would’ve been funnier if during Ted’s big retrial, he argued that with this newfound celebrity he should get the same legal status as a person because reality stars were still considered worthy of having rights. This would have allowed Seth to have a parade of celebrity cameos from bloggers, eSport athletes, podcasters and stars from top YouTube channels, and hit reality TV shows that no one actually cares to find out what casts has done to get famous or rich. And after Kim Kardashian testifies about her personal income and how much she is worth, then the trial judge could look over at Ted and say, “Fuck it! If Kim is a person, then you can be one, too, Ted”; Proving once again that in America being popular, fake or rich lets one break laws or receive favorable treatment.
Even the New York Comic-Con sight gag of seeing Patrick Wartbum as Guy, wearing a Tick costume that he voiced for the 90’s Tick cartoon, and Michael Dorn playing Rick dressed as his Star Trek alter ego of Worf was painful to watch. Rick and Guy bullying geeks and fanboys at Comic-Con didn’t even make any sense, as related to the Tick and Worf characters, to get even one half-ass laugh.
Bottom line, Ted 2 is not worth seeing in the theaters, on Redbox or even on cable. I have to give Ted 2 a $ because it was using too many racist Black jokes to make up for the insipid, lazy writing, dull directing and predictable cannabis driven narrative “creativity” by Seth MacFarlane.
