Ricky Stanicky
Boys will be boys in this dinosaur of a comedy that should have been left in the 1990s
John Cena gets left hanging in Peter Farrelly's deadly dull comedy Ricky Stanicky.
In a moment of blind panic, Ricky Stanicky was born. When a childhood prank goes horribly wrong, pals Dean, JT, and Wes blame a fake child named Ricky Stanicky for their crimes. It works, and a lie is born.
Any time they do anything wrong, they blame Ricky. That darn Ricky keeps them out late, gives them weed to smoke, and scores them beer.
Now grown men, Wes, Dean, and JT (Jermaine Fowler, Zac Efron, and Andrew Santino) still use Ricky as an excuse whenever they need him. When JT, who’s married and expecting a baby, scores some sweet tickets to a concert it’s a no-brainer to use Ricky as an excuse to skip the baby shower they’ve been planning for months. They claim Ricky’s cancer is back (he gets cancer whenever they need him to) and they need to go support him during surgery in Albany. Immediately given the green-light to comfort their dying friend, the boys actually hop a flight to Atlantic City where they turn off their phones and party. But when JT’s wife goes into labor and he misses the birth of his son, the boys have some explaining to do.
Instead of coming clean, they double down. They insist Ricky is real and that he’ll come to the child’s bris to prove all the wild stories are true. Now, they just need to find a believable Ricky. Desperate, Dean turns to washed-up actor Rod Rimestead (John Cena), offering him a few thousand dollars to play Ricky for the weekend.
It turns out Rod is pretty good at playing Ricky, and might not want to give up the part. Can the boys deal with a real-life Ricky Stanicky or will their lies be exposed?
From one half of the brain trust that brought you Shallow Hal comes another comedy that is so dated and dumb that the only charitable explanation for its existence is that everyone involved had a house payment. The basic premise of the film doesn’t work in the internet age. For any of this to work, every person excluding the central trio would have to have no phone, no social media profiles, and a head injury. No one — not one parent, spouse, or boss — ever questioned why a man who runs a globally significant charity never had a single photo on the internet? No parent ever insisted on meeting Ricky? No one ever noticed that the credit card statements showed plane tickets to different destinations than the locations which Dean, Wes, and JT used in their stories. No one ever asked to FaceTime Ricky since he couldn’t attend his supposed best friends’ weddings/birthdays/graduations?
The whole film feels like it was written and directed by a man who still asks his kids to Google things for him. And while I don’t know if director Peter Farrelly knows how hard it is to invent a person in the modern age, I do know it took him and five other people to write the script, which is just silly considering it feels like it was rambled into existence by a drunken frat boy seconds before he lost consciousness.
And while the premise itself is dumb, the real issue with the movie is it manages to be both stale and cringe at every turn. Farrelly made his bones in the gross-out comedy genre, making a bunch of films that have not aged well, and a few classics like There’s Something About Mary and King Pin. More recently, he’s tried his hand at awards bait, winning himself an Oscar for the dubious Green Book. Sadly, this return to his comedic roots just proves that Farrelly’s sense of humor is stuck squarely in the 1990s.
The whole film feels like something you’d find on VHS while cleaning out the shelves. The main characters are obnoxious bozos who never consider anyone’s feelings but their own, their significant others are all buzzkill nags. There are no consequences for anything. And we’re all supposed to cheer when 30-something men learn the lesson that living an elaborate lie so you always get your own way is…wrong.
All of this would be forgiveable if there was something funny in the movie. Anything. I’m not picky. But what we get are running gags that feel dated (LOL the boss looks like he’s performing a sex act when he talks), or have been done before (the dog gets beaten up by an improbable animal!). It doesn’t help that Efron, Fowler, and Santino spend the whole movie mumbling lines like they’re being held on camera at gunpoint.
The only person who seems to want Ricky Stanicky to work is poor John Cena, who throws himself into every joke like his life depends on it. While it’s admirable to be game for anything, Cena should probably learn to say no to projects now and then. Wasting your charisma and affability on a movie that will get lost in the maw of straight-to-streaming films isn’t worth it.
If you’re feeling nostalgic for the gross-out lunacy of the Farrelly Brothers films, There’s Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber are both available on streaming. Ricky Stanicky, like its eponymous subject, really shouldn’t exist.
Verdict: Dated and dull, don’t waste your time.
Ricky Stanicky is rated R and is available on Prime.
