Depressed since his painful divorce from Lori, John watches as his best friend Ted’s relationship with Tami-Lynn evolves towards marriage. But after a few months, Ted decides he wants to be a father. That’s when he discovers he has a problem: in the eyes of the American government, he isn’t human, he’s merely an object. Determined to become a person and lead a life just like everyone else, Ted turns to John for support with a legal suit against the state. His attorney is Samantha L. Jackson, a freshly minted, smart lawyer…

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What to do with a comedy in which 95% of the jokes don’t work, one that isn’t even worth a polite smile? Ted 2 confirms, in the wake of the bland 2013 Oscars and the spectacular failure of the 2014 western comedy A Million Ways to Die in the West, that Seth MacFarlane has nothing more to offer. His latest project is just a bunch of dumb jokes, gags and puns crudely slapped together around superficial characters with a cardboard plot in an attempt to make a “real” movie. Pushed by the phenomenal and incomprehensible success of 2012’s mediocre Ted, the actor/director, who also voices the bear, brings out the heavy artillery in an attempt to win over the public, and he does actually manage a few funny moments – the trial advocating tolerance, the fight at Comic-Con – but they get lost in a multitude of blunders resulting from some really awful comic timing. And when he sinks to using Liam Neeson to reference Taken while stealing the music to Jurassic Park for a dumb scene and obviously plugging Transformers (which also stars Mark Wahlberg), the result is a vulgar, soulless industry product of the kind that MacFarlane used to make fun of so well.