Ted 2

Marky Mark Wahlberg is back as John – the middle-aged stoner guy whose teddy bear came to life due to his Christmas wish decades and decades ago. After the crazy events of the first movie, Ted (voice by Seth MacFarlane) is moving forward with his life as he gets married to Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth), and the two of them want to start a family to save their troubled marriage.

Due to circumstances you learn during the film, adoption is the best option for them, but the process raises several red flags with the state of Massachusetts, leading the bureaucracy to rule Ted is property, and not a person who can have a job, be married or adopt a baby.

Looking to fight for his civil rights as his life falls apart, Ted’s case is taken up by young legal eagle Samantha (Amanda Seyfried), who tries to establish Ted is a sentient being who deserves to pursue his happiness like anyone else, while smoking as much pot as possible with John and Ted.

Does Ted have a case?

Will any of them be sober enough to remember which day to show up to court?

Writer/director Seth MacFarlane and his co-writers Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild (that name HAS to be made up) simultaneously try to do too much and too little with Ted 2.

On the “Too Much” side of the ledger, the script is trying to go down several paths, but none of which truly feels strong enough to carry the movie nor is developed enough to be the featured plot. The audience is taken from joke to joke to joke without too much time given to tying it all together.

At times, we are off on the battle to save Ted’s rights. The courtroom scenes are there to feature a few jokes, and show how everyone on the writing team knows how to author an opening argument, but we don’t get much else.

Sometimes, we are seeing the strained marriage of Ted and Tami-Lynn.

At other times, we have to wonder if Samantha and John are hitting it off (because Marky Mark has to do something in this movie).

Sometimes, it’s an opportunity to watch Ted and John goof off (and we need more of these moments since they are the funniest, most entertaining, and, oddly, most endearing, since they show us how much these two friends care for each other).

At other times, MacFarlane and crew have a funny scenario or piece of dialogue they wanted to include, so here it is, whether it fits in or not (They might as well just put a big sign on the screen that says, “Hey! Look! We can get Liam Neeson to be in our movie!”).

The scattered sense of it is not commendable, but it is funny, so you can forgive a great deal, but not all of it.

Also, Ted 2 is a slowly paced movie with a distracting subplot too awfully reminiscent of the same awful subplot that sidetracked the first Ted movie. The jokes we get are funny (especially the nerdy jokes, but that’s probably because I get them) and some of the crazy, wild adventures have you laughing just as hard as the first time you saw Ted.

However, it’s not enough. Ted 2 often goes for the heartstrings more than the funny bone. Where is the joyous celebration of the naughty? Where is the glee in being bad? It’s missing too much, and what replaces it doesn’t have the depth to make the movie better.

Worst of all, Ted 2 runs out of steam. As the jokes start arriving at longer and longer intervals, Ted 2 is a movie plodding to an end that we kind of figured out around the time the opening credits started. OK, we knew how it would end once we saw a trailer for the movie.

If they doubled the jokes, we might have something awesome.

Ted 2 is rated R for crude and sexual content, pervasive language, and some drug use.