With 'Ricky Stanicky,' Peter Farrelly goes back to the gutter, with mixed results
John Cena stars in Farrelly’s mostly funny return to R-rated comedy
Director Peter Farrelly and his brother Bobby pioneered a particular style of raunchy studio comedies in the 1990s and early aughts. He took a hard pivot towards socially conscious drama in 2018 with Green Book, an unsubtle rehash of Driving Miss Daisy that told a story about racism by making it about the white guy. Green Book became the current century’s least deserved Oscar winner for Best Picture.
Farrelly has made his long-awaited return to raunch with Ricky Stanicky, an undoubtedly funny but occasionally inexplicable comedy vehicle for John Cena. Like the vintage movies by the Farrellys and their successor, Judd Apatow, it avails itself of. scatological humor and an underlying story about overgrown manchildren learning to mature and grow up.
Bobby Farrelly, for his part, directed last year’s Woody Harrelson basketball-players-with-Down-Syndrome comedy Champions. It’s unclear why the Farrellys split up professionally. Still, I don’t see anyone trying to parse which brother was responsible for which aspects of their older movies, the way cineastes of late have been doing with the Coens.
Like most of the older Farrelly pictures, Ricky Stanicky is set in their hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. And there’s even the requisite scene where the hero fights a small animal, which this time entails Zac Efron trying to rescue a dog from a duck on a golf course.
If Ricky Stanicky feels like a film from another era, that’s because its script has been in development for an uncommonly long time. It was on the Black List all the way back in 2010 and was in the works with various casts at different times over the years. That might explain why the film nearly has enough screenwriters to field a baseball team (David Occhino and Jason Decker have the “story by” credit, while the credited writers are Jeff Bushell, Brian Jarvis, James Lee Freeman, Pete Jones, Mike Cerrone and Farrelly himself.)
However, it is a pretty funny concept that wouldn’t have been out of place had it come out in 2002 or 2003. And it’s not like Green Book wasn’t decades out of date.
Ricky Stanicky concerns a trio of dudes in their 30s (Zac Efron, Jermaine Fowler, and Andrew Santino). We meet them in 1999, when they were about 12 years old, meaning they likely grew up loving early Farrelly movies like Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary. When they pull a prank that accidentally results in a house getting burned down, they pin it on an imaginary fourth friend named “Ricky Stanicky.” It somehow works since they’re apparently dealing with the world’s laziest arson investigators.
In the years since, the men have used the nonexistent Stanicky as an all-purpose scapegoat to escape responsibilities and obligations, with none of their wives or other significant others ever questioning why they’ve never met the man. This requires elaborate mythology, which paints Stanicky as a great humanitarian who works with Bono in Africa and has survived multiple kinds of cancer. (That Bono joke, in particular, was likely a lot more topical in the 2010 version of the script.)
But when one Stanicky plan goes awry, they’re put in a position to demonstrate that he exists. So, the men hire Rod (John Cena), to impersonate “Ricky.” He’s a ne’er-do-well alcoholic and aspiring actor who does a bottom-feeding act in Atlantic City, where he sings hair metal song parodies that are about masturbation.
There’s a lot here that doesn’t add up. Depending on the scene, Rod is either a drunken disaster or ruthlessly competent in every way. Characters would have to be absolute idiots to full for the ruse for more than five minutes, and a running bit involving Jeffrey Ross as a mohel is absolute death (even beyond the part where Ross probably shouldn’t be in a movie at all.) The plot machinations get particularly ridiculous in the third act when Ricky is brought into the workplace, and the film’s many plot strands come together in a very inorganic way.
But what does work is Cena, who shows an out-of-control comedic energy that he earlier brought to the first Vacation Friends movie (let’s not talk about the sequel.) When Cena was first in movies, he naturally did action stuff because he looked the part, but it turns out he’s pretty damn good at comedy, something he never showed much of in his pro wrestling career.
The Atlantic City hair metal bit is unbelievably silly, but I couldn’t stop laughing at it; the whole thing feels like a homage to Dani Luv, who performed similarly raunchy parodies at Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse on the Lower East Side for years. And while it’s standard plot hole for a character (like Mark Wahlberg in the Ted movies) to be a stoned layabout, it also ridiculously jacked. Ricky Stanicky endeavors to close that plot hole with a line of dialogue.
Efron returns to comedy after giving the best performance of his career in The Iron Claw, where he tried his hand at Cena’s old profession. He’s playing more of a straight man here, but it’s much more successful than his starring turn in The Greatest Beer Run Ever, also for Farrelly. I liked Andrew Santino, who played Lil’ Dickey’s exasperated manager on his sitcom Dave. At the same time, Jermaine Fowler finds the right notes as Wes, the gay one of the group, something the Farrellys’ older movies never had.
The film lands today on Prime Video, but middling as it is, it deserved better than that.