The last time I felt compelled to write about movies I was unable to finish was just over a year ago. The movies were "
The Conformist" and "
Perfect Sense". (
Read my entry on those here.)
Another movie I felt unable to finish watching was "
Fantastic Mr. Fox" a little over three years ago. (
Read what I wrote about that here.)
Earlier than that was "
Vicky Cristina Barcelona" (before I recognised how unfair it is to grade a movie I didn't see to the end). I actually tried to finish off "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" at a later date but it didn't take long before I felt compelled to turn it off again. I have never reached the point where Penelope Cruz turns up. (
That entry is here.)
I've now seen another
two films which I've felt unable to finish. Read on...
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The Wolverine (2013)I watched this at a friend's house around Christmas time, so I might well have finished it if I was watching it on my own. But having already been bored to death by the first half, I'm rather lacking the motivation to get hold of the DVD to see the second half. (I'd already seen leaked footage of the after-credits sequence when the film was in the cinema.)
I was a little confused when the movie began with Wolverine wandering in the woods. I had presumed that the film would start off with Wolverine already in Japan rather than taking us there. Our metal-clawed hero takes pity on a bear that is dying in the forest. He then makes his way into a local bar to find the people responsible for its death. I was a little unsure at this stage why we were wasting time on this, but then Wolverine gave a little speech. Logan, the Wolverine, is no fool. He's worked out that one of the hunters has been using an illegal poison which sent the bear mad. So even while this hunter is boasting about how savage the bear is and how great it is that they took the bear down, he's failed to recognise (or at least he's not acknowledging) that he's actually responsible for some of the damage the bear caused. Logan's also not very happy that this hunter failed to finish off the bear properly too.
The first thing Logan does? He stabs the hunter in the hand with the dart. When the hunter denies that he was using illegal poisons, Logan gruffly replies "well you've got nothing to worry about then." This was the first and last part of the movie where I was excited. We do not even get to see Wolverine kick arse here, because a Japanese woman (with her own X-man powers) turns up to break up the fight.
In Japan there's some business owner who is inexplicably still alive after being shielded from a nuclear fire by a sort of manhole-cover shaped piece of metal. He's grown to be an old man since the Wolverine helped to shield him when one of the nuclear bombs hit Japan at the end of the second world war. And it's hard to think of him terribly fondly when he's asking to take Wolverine's healing powers for himself.
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However, it's not long before the plot devolves into a fairly generic damsel in distress plot. Logan's old friend finally dies and he has left his company to his daughter. Some other guy is not happy about that and is openly trying to kill her. Meanwhile, somehow the process whereby Wolverine loses his healing power is started by a sinister figure and so I spent half the time wondering why he wasn't experiencing high blood loss from the gaping wounds he regularly makes in his own arms with the razor sharp blades he uses.
The damsel in distress figure had very little personality. The same goes for the jealous figure who wanted to inherit the company. With the character moments being so flat, it was hard to be excited by the fairly ho-hum action sequences.
One side-character psychically knows how and when everyone is going to die (but yet sometimes the future is clouded in uncertainty - whenever it works best for the plot). This was a ridiculous power. It was introduced without much fanfare and I had trouble taking it seriously.
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While I cannot give this a rating without finishing it, you can be fairly sure it wouldn't be high. Hugh Jackman is great, but he has very little to work with here. It's difficult to imagine what Darren Aronofsky was planning to do with this story before we walked out on the project. Weirdly, it seemed to me that the film went downhill the moment Wolverine went to Japan, which is strange since the idea of Wolverine in Japan actually had me quite excited. This isn't unbearable, but it's bad enough that I'm disinclined to give it a second go. (D- perhaps?)
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Ted (2012)I should make clear from the start, I actually like Family Guy. (Well, 'liked' Family Guy. I reached a particular season, didn't laugh at all in most of episodes I watched, and pretty much gave up on the series after that. And yes, the early seasons involved this whole politically incorrect 'shock' humour and yes, the character of Peter Griffin was pretty obnoxious and at times the humour could wear thin. But what Family Guy had going for it was the creativity made possible by the cartoon format. Whether it was spaceship sperms, exploding donkeys, an epic fight with a man in a chicken suit, a police officer in a wheelchair who is infinitely more manly and capable than anyone else in the show, or a monkey who points angrily on cue, there was always something surprising and unique in the show. You simply had no idea what was coming next, so whether it was due to cleverness, satire, irony, silliness, shock or just because you were caught unawares by the pure randomness of it all, the volley of hit-and-miss jokes would generally be pretty successful in keeping me laughing.
So now we have "Ted" which begins by pretending that will be a straight-up inspirational children's movie. The first indication that it won't be, is when we are told that it is a Christmas tradition to "beat up the Jewish kid". The 'Jewish kid' in question, cycling into frame wearing glasses and looking relatively nerdy. (The intended joke here being that neither the bullies nor even the 'Jewish kid' being beaten up by them has any interest in being friends with the protagonist.) This is just one of many pointless references to race, sexuality or gender that litter this movie and, I felt, failed to work as humour.
The first point where I did give a chuckle was when I realised Patrick Stewart was the narrator and he pulled off a gag exactly like you'd expect from his character in "American Dad". The line goes like this: "Now if there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that nothing is more powerful than a young boy's wish. Except an Apache helicopter. An Apache helicopter has machine guns AND missiles. It is an unbelievably impressive complement of weaponry, an absolute death machine."
Perhaps they could have done with keeping a narrator throughout the movie, because it was one of the better opportunities for randomness. For the most part, the only thing that is out of the ordinary is that there is a talking teddy bear. Asides from that the world the characters are inhabiting is pretty much plain and realistic. And it's a real pity, because there are certain points where the over-the-top crazy style of a Family Guy episode would probably have worked a lot better.
For example, our protagonist (played by Mark Wahlberg, now that's a terrible casting choice for a start) is obsessed with the movie "Flash Gordon". Initially I was annoyed because it simply made me wish I was watching that instead, but it turns out that Sam Jones, the actor who played Flash, actually appears in the film and offers the protagonist and his talking teddy bear some cocaine at a party. We have a whole dream sequence where the protagonist is basically in the Flash Gordon movie, flying about with Flash on some flying device. But in "Ted" this just feels like a fairly plain blue screen moment and I can't help but feel there would have been more scope for creativity if this had been animated in the "Family Guy" style as a more exciting and action-filled sequence.
And unfortunately we also have one of the most racist moments in the film connected with Sam Jones character. We are told earlier that in Ted's new place he has asian neighbours - at which point he also comments "at least they don't have a gong" (seriously?). Sam Jones is dared to punch through the wall and unsurprisingly the neighbours get upset by the hole in their wall. One of them comes rushing into Ted's flat shouting "I live here long time" (seriously???) and Sam Jones, in drug-fuelled haze, decides that this unfortunate stereotype is Ming the Merciless from his movie.
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(Yes, that's right, he is carrying a live duck - and not only when he's being mistaken for Ming the Merciless.)Earlier on in the film one of Mark Wahlberg's co-workers claims that he cannot remember, but apepars to have texted someone and asked them to beat him up that night. This seems like a fairly promising absurd moment, until Mark Wahlberg starts asking him whether he is gay and whether he belongs to some kind of "gay beat-up club". At the time he claims that he's not sure if he's gay. This same character apparently scheduling attacks on himself later introduces Ryan Reynolds as his boyfriend, because that's supposed to be funny? I guess?
That's not the only homophobic joke in the movie, another one stood out for me was where Mila Kunis says they've got turkey burgers for dinner and Ted responds by saying "have we got homosexuals coming to dinner tonight"?
As I've already said, Mark Wahlberg seems characteristically flat. I was quite impressed with Mark Wahlberg as a boxer in "The Fighter" since he always seems to have the demeanour of someone who spends much of his time getting punched in the head, but I've always held his extremely bland and lifeless performance in Burton's "Planet of the Apes" remake against him. It was rather more surprising, however, to see how bland Mila Kunis comes across here.
Seth McFarlane takes on the voice acting role of Ted, but he feels less like a character and more like a stand-up comedian lumbered with mostly lame material. He throws out as many gags as he can and very few of them hit the mark.
Joel McHale (Jeff Winger from Community) is actually pretty good here, initially at least. He plays an obnoxious boss who consistently hits on Mila Kunis. But when he actually gets a chance to go on a date with Mila Kunis' character, the material apparently becomes harder to work with.
About the only thing here that is consistently great is the CG animation of the central sentient teddy bear, Ted. But while these animated computer graphics are fantastic, I feel the film in which those effects are employed is distinctly unworthy.
It may well be that the jokes here are intended in the name of satire and McFarlane presumably wants to avoid any kind of racism, homophobia and misogyny with close friends. However, the fact is that the jokes here do not have any obvious point. They don't seem to be there to make a fool of particular characters or to highlight problems in the world. Rightly or wrongly, they just seem to highlight either bigotry in the writer or a presumed bigotry in the audience. I was left feeling particularly uncomfortable while watching the movie because there is practically nothing that I found funny here.
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I'd heard that "Ted" was a surprisingly heartfelt film for Seth McFarlane, but to be frank "Family Guy" and "American Dad" have had the odd heartfelt moment here and there. The problem is that "Ted" feels like a more openly offensive cheesy romantic comedy. Most of these kinds of romantic comedies have some level of offensiveness to them, so this fits right in. Except that those sorts of romantic comedies mainly manage to appeal to their audience because they are some of the few films out there with multiple female protagonists. "Ted" cannot boast the same and so in the end, this is the same sort of romantic comedy format with an increased and more explicit offensiveness, a distinct lack of any decent humour - and what's more with a male audience in mind, who surely have an enormous number of male-dominated alternatives which are both funnier and more exciting than this.
I mentioned "Flash Gordon". Now admittedly it's well-known that Flash Gordon has racist elements in the Ming the Merciless character and quite daft sexist elements too. The acting from the protagonist is not very good. But "Flash Gordon" is distinctly more fun than "Ted" and I think not being any fun is a pretty heinous crime from a movie like "Ted".
I cannot give "Ted" a rating because I didn't finish it (though I got a fair way through nonetheless), but needless to say, this is a bottom of the rung kind of film. (E+ at best.)
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