1. Ted
Why It Should Have Been Great: Seth MacFarlane's foray into live-action features Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis and Ted, a cuddly teddy bear that comes to life thanks to a wish made on a shooting star. Sounds sickly, but make no mistake - it's definitely not a Disney film. MacFarlane's tar-black humour, peppered with a near-endless supply of pop culture references, puts this toy strictly out of children's reach.
Why It Wasn't: With credits as director, co-writer, co-producer and leading (voice) actor, its easy to dismiss Ted
as simply the latest of MacFarlanes vanity projects. Certainly, in rounding up members of his 'Family Guy' cast (Mila Kunis plays the love interest while Alex Borstein and Patrick Warburton have bit parts) and anthropomorphising yet another animal with the very worst of human behaviour, originality is one of the first things noticeable by its absence. Wahlberg plays John Bennett, a man who has taken his childhood friend, a real-life, tough-talking, pot-smoking teddy bear, into his thirties but now has to decide whether he should sacrifice it all for his girlfriend, Lori (Kunis). Needless to say, it's another buddy movie in which the main female character is shown in a less than flattering light. Here Lori is a humourless spoilsport who exists solely to remind our slacker hero about growing up and accepting responsibility. Still, it could be worse: practically every other female character is a prostitute. With his gruff Beantown accent, potty mouth and insatiable appetite for most earthly pleasures, Ted is a character you'll either fall in love with for ever or grow tired of in the opening ten minutes. After the novelty of hearing such filth come from such a cute face wears off, chances are you'll pick the latter. For the film is essentially a substandard rom-com seldom elevated by its scattergun approach to humour (namely, throw enough mud) and Wahlbergs comic timing; the latter impressively showcased in his reeling off of forty white trash girls names without taking a breath. With a nostalgic (masked as ironic) eye to the Eighties, talk of the buddies favourite film, Flash Gordon, inexplicably leads to an over-long running joke (another MacFarlane trait) about its star, Sam J. Jones, demolishing a house party; a scene offensive not for its rather racist denouement but for how weakly it limps to such a finish.Ultimately, for all the shock tactics, Ted is a significantly sweeter film than any amount of four- letter words spat from a stuffed toy would have you believe. It just has a hard time admitting it, that's all.