Ricky Stanicky
Before permanently adolescent men movies about comedy were taken over by Judd Apatow, Peter Farrelly was there. With his brother Bobby, his movies could be sweetly funny like “Dumb and Dumber” or “There’s Something About Mary” (or in the case of his solo outing in “Movie 43,” a notorious trainwreck). Since then he’s been all over the place with television, an Oscar winning “Green Book,” and the dramatic Vietnam War era misadventure “The Greatest Beer Run Ever.” Now he’s back to the stale dude comedies of yore with “Ricky Stanicky.”
“Ricky Stanicky” feels like a throwback, and not in a good way. It’s more like every tired bit and joke ever done smashed together into one movie that has nothing particularly clever or innovative to say. Farrelly shares writing credit with five other writers plus two others who share a story by credit, so it seems to be tough to point fingers at exactly what went wrong without concluding “it’s all wrong.”
Ricky Stanicky is technically not the name of a character at the beginning of this movie he’s an imaginary scapegoat created out of necessity to get three young boys out of trouble after a prank involving setting fire to a bag filled with poop goes horribly awry. Over the years (illustrated in cartoon credit sequence), they blame Ricky for all sorts of hijinks and bad decisions. Even as adults Dean (Zac Efron), JT (Andrew Santino), and Wes (Jermaine Fowler) still cite Ricky as a reason why they need to leave their families but actually they just want to go somewhere fun, or to sports games, or concerts. When they finally take one too many covert trips, their loved ones insist on meeting reformed reprobate Ricky Stanicky. To keep up appearances, they hire down-and-out alcoholic actor from Atlantic City named Rod (John Cena) to play Ricky at an upcoming family event, and of course, hilarity ensues. Or at least it intermittently shows up between jokes about women’s appearances and racist comments.
So much of “Ricky Stanicky” is juvenile and joyless, playing on drawn out jokes, bottom shelf masturbation punchlines, and varying degrees of cringe comedy. William H. Macy appears as Dean and JT’s boss mostly to make crude gestures unwittingly insinuating blow jobs during corporate meetings. Jeff Ross cameos as a goofy rabbi who accidentally takes ketamine and can’t complete the bris he’s there to conduct. The director of “Green Book” made the only Black character in the cast (Wes) an unemployed stoner while Dean and JT hold white collar jobs might be funny for someone but I’m not among them.
To their credit, Efron and Cena make the best out of the shit sandwich they’ve been served. As Dean, Efron gets the most runway for some emotional scenes he’s the man with a plan stuck watching Rod as Ricky throw him and his friends (and later his girlfriend) one curveball after another, further inserting himself into their lives. The experience pushes him to grow up a little bit more than usual, and Efron plays this progression with a sense of earnestness that recalls some of Farrelly’s better comedies
Speaking of Cena, he commits completely to Rod, taking the character to its limits, whether that be showing symptoms of alcohol withdrawal or doing terrible impressions of famous rock stars singing cum puns. But he also brings in facts and stories from his own life like he’s been Ricky all along traveling to countries I’ve never heard of before, working with Bono, surviving cancer. He takes this lackluster script and uses it as an opportunity to show off his acting skills, in fact, with one exception (a very funny line from Audrey Plaza), he is the only one who can keep a straight face long enough to complete some of these sentences.
And yet As ridiculous as it is seeing Cena run around the streets of Miami in what looks like Britney Spears’s “Hit Me Baby One More Time” outfit while being chased by what he thinks are hit men or watching Efron’s heart break when he can’t get Rod to stop playing Ricky once they’re back at the office there are only so many times you can ruin a joke before it stops being funny anymore. There are only so many times you can kill a mood before people stop laughing entirely. “Ricky Stanicky” is at best a mixed bag. At its worst? A haunting reminder that some childhood games are better left buried in the past.
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