There was a time back in the ’90s when director Peter Farrelly and his brother could parlay off the backbone of select comedy films most audiences have witnessed, such as Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, and Me, Myself, and Irene (distributed in 2000). The juvenile bits got carried in with gleeful energy and unabashed dedication that a charm was attached to them. Farrelly earned his flowers with Green Book in 2018, a comedy exploring an exciting friendship that advances the white savior narrative with redemption, and then collapsed four years later with Zac Efron on The Greatest Beer Run Ever. Now, with Ricky Stanicky, Farrelly jumps back into his ostensible comfort zone yet can’t find the anarchic and fun elements to justify its farcical existence.
To be fair, the feature embodies how slapstick and escalating chaos ruled for a while in a time of yesterday. This episode, more or less, appears to be inspired by The Family Circus comics. After a Halloween prank that goes awry when they are kids, the three amigos Dean (Efron), JT (Andrew Santino), and Wes (Jermaine Fowler) haphazardly resort to scrawling a name, “Ricky Stanicky,” on a jacket to leave behind and then continuing to use that imaginary friend ploy to cover all their misbehavior for over twenty years. In the present, with one act of pushing too far (going to Atlantic City) to avoid a baby shower and JT’s wife delivering six weeks early, the guys must prove Ricky exists or be renowned as liars. (Common sense is why hasn’t a single police officer or someone else over the years also been interested in uncovering this phantom individual that the guys have pulled out of their pocket?)
So, while in Atlantic City, they stumble upon an alcoholic failed actor, Rod (John Cena), an actor that tries to get by on, excuse me, “jizz jams.” Returning home and ready to be at a bris where everyone wants to meet Ricky, they hire Rod to play as their imaginary friend while giving him a bible to keep him informed of all their past comments and information about what Ricky has been up to his whole life. Expeditions in Africa? Check. Pretending to have cancer? Check. Reading up Reddit posts to get juicy bits of everyone’s life? Check! It can’t get any more Wedding Crashers than that.
It sounds fun and borderline religious, although the latter detail could’ve been an aspect honed further to create a more dynamic film. In practice, this film is absurdly contrived and lacks the packing of those supposed comedic punches. A cluster of penis jokes becomes weary exceptionally quickly, and the insipid nature keeps all the potential themes shot down like footnotes in a Word document. A team of six writers clearly couldn’t recognize how this movie meanders on until some redemptional third act, and it doesn’t benefit when the cast is merely there to accommodate like backgrounds in a Wendy’s commercial. Poor Zac Efron gets a worthwhile arc crafted up about his past trauma-hood and now his outward lies jeopardizing his partner Erin’s (Lex Scott Davis) future, only for it to become saddled under another hand gesture that’s probably too obscene to write here.
There is one saving grace in this whole ordeal: John Cena. His knack for deadpan humor and earnest commitment to this “broken human being” concept keep the film afloat as much as possible. He does a worthwhile job, taking on the Jim Carrey-esque role and keeping us reminded that he can stretch well into territory of his own, like his over-the-top father protective character in Blockers and his misguided patriot, alpha-man-boy bluster of an antihero in The Suicide Squad/Peacemaker series. Had this feature spent more time pawning off his abilities and cutting out several chunks of limp noise, we’d be assessing it with a more positive energy.
As it stands, Ricky Stanicky is another flat-tone, witless comedic film that doesn’t amount to much except as another vehicle for John Cena to go nuts and showcase his comical prowess on another screen that doesn’t involve his wrestling roots. There’s a reason folks consider him one of the GOATs in professional wrestling (yes, we caught that shirt when they met his character in Atlantic City, as evident in the headlining picture).
