Peter Farrelly returns to his roots, sort of, with grossout men-behaving-like-boys comedy Ricky Stanicky (now on Amazon Prime Video). And I say “sort of” because although the writer-director made some movies without his brother Bobby Farrelly, this is the first time Peter’s taken the raunch route without him. Peter’s solo outings, Green Book (schlock that won an Oscar, much to the chagrin of many) and The Greatest Beer Run Ever (heartwarming, forgettable) deviated from his classic Dumb and Dumber/Kingpin/There’s Something About Mary blecchout-comedy reputation, replacing kicked-in-the-nuts and bodily-fluid gags with sentimental drippery. Stanicky finds Peter reuniting with his Beer Runner Zac Efron, who stars across from wrestler-turned-film-star John Cena, and while the movie ain’t great, it’s definitely funny – funny in a ha-ha kind of way, and funny in that it may finally have pushed us over the edge and made us fans of Efron and Cena, rather improbably. Go figure.
The Gist: Twenty-five years ago. Halloween. Three boys pulled a prank and nearly burned someone’s house down. On the spot and desperate, they blamed it on a fictional concoction of a non-human being named Ricky Stanicky. And that shit worked. The cops couldn’t find record of a Ricky Stanicky and apparently shrugged it off and everyone went on with their lives, sort of. In the present day, those three boys – Dean (Efron), JT (Andrew Santino) and Wes (Jermaine Fowler) – are adults whose psychological selves are still frozen in the psychological amber of 1999. See, Ricky Stanicky still “exists” in the sense that he’s the scapegoat for all their shenanigans. Example: In order to get out of attending a baby shower for JT’s wife, they gin up a story that their lifelong childhood pal Ricky’s testicular cancer has returned, and they need to go see him. Then they hop a plane to Atlantic City to see a shitty DJ give a dumb concert, and they get all their stories straight and write them in the Ricky Stanicky “bible” so they have airtight stories when their S.O.s inevitably pepper them with questions. They even have a dedicated Ricky Stanicky phone with a fake Insta account and everything. THE PERFECT CRIME.
Turns out the trip to Atlantic City was fateful, though. Fateful as all hell: There, they meet Rock Hard Rod (Cena), a desperate alcoholic and wannabe actor working as a one-man cover band playing X-rated parodies of rock ‘n’ roll hits at the Slot Swamp Casino. “When a boner comes along, you must grip it,” he sings while wearing Devo garb. Classy! Dean and JT and Wes barely shoo away Rod when JT gets the call that the baby is coming six weeks early, so they zoom back home to Rhode Island just in time to miss the birth. Whoops. The Stanicky ruse gets its usual barrage of questions – especially from JT’s mother-in-law because, you know, mothers-in-law, right? – but they hold it together through the testicular-cancer-spread-to-his-anus sob story, and just barely survive.
Whew, I tell you, whew. But! Nobody back home has ever met this Ricky, and he absolutely HAS to be invited to the baby’s bris! Now, I’m sure the irony of a man who’s missing a nut coming to see a baby boy get the tip of his wang nipped isn’t lost on you, no sir. That’s the Farrelly style, y’know. So they hire Rock Hard Rod to play Ricky Stanicky, which should be a recipe for disaster, since he gets off the plane looking like one of those hairless cats basted with a fresh coat of honey glaze. That’s what three days of withdrawal can do to an alcoholic who’s cold-turkeying. But he shows up at the bris and slays. That shitty mother-in-law? Put right in her damn place, boy howdy. Even Evan and JT’s boss Ted Summerhayes (William H. Macy) is impressed, and Evan’s frustrated journalist wife Erin (Lex Scott Davis) gets a much-needed break when she successfully pitches a TV piece about Ricky’s absolutely legendary and also nonexistent nonprofit work overseas, helping poverty-stricken people not die, and all that. Will this paper-thin ruse hold up against the hurricane gale of circumstance? Probably not. Brace for impact!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Stanicky appears to be the pinnacle of Batshit Cena, who takes the wacky persona he cultivated in junk like Vacation Friends and Daddy’s Home 2 and makes hay with Farrellyisms culled from the cream of their filmography.
Performance Worth Watching: OK, technically The Iron Claw marked my official transition to Efron fandom, because in Stanicky, he’s basically the straight guy. That opens the door for Cena to go for broke, and although the sloppy screenplay prevents him from jackpotting it, he still wins reasonably big, and continues to be the best thing in some pretty bad movies – although in this particular bad movie, he might actually be good enough to make me recommend it.
Memorable Dialogue: Summerhayes: “A circumcision party is my go-to when I need to relax.”
Sex and Skin: How we managed to get through a Farrelly blecchout without seeing some poor dude’s bird and eggs get pinched in a vise-grip or something seems like a miracle. No, all the sex stuff here is purely verbal.
Our Take: Evidence that Farrelly has grown up a little bit: The plot introduces a love interest for Rod-slash-Ricky, which I was absolutely certain would lead to a gross gag about “Ricky” supposedly missing a testicle while Rod is not missing a testicle, but alas. I’d say Farrelly left that joke dangling, but I’m classier than that. This blatant lack of follow-through on such a setup shows either a level of who-cares sloppiness or blossoming maturity – or both, as the case may be, since the two notions dovetail for a slippy-sloppy meh of an ending that just peters out, delivering impotent sentimentality and no decent punchlines (and strikes me as a hapless compromise among the screenplay’s six, count ’em, six writers, with two additional “story by” credits).
Yet all those writers each contributed a few jokes each, it seems, because against all odds and sense, Ricky Stanicky is a reasonably functional comedy driven by an in-the-red Cena. Man’s on fire here, wham-bam with his timing and showing a comically “psychotic” edge to his character that you’ll wish was exploited for some darker comedy (which, frankly, I don’t think Farrelly is game for anymore). The script features some crispy-fried one-liners, the ever-amusing Macy is game for a little crass absurdity, Santino gets an angry exhortation or three, Jeffrey Ross turns up as a serially punning rabbi, etc. Efron is kind of lost here, and you won’t give a single shit about his character’s apparently slightly troubled marriage or any of the half-assed character bits here, but laughs, as ever, go a long way toward paving over some of the screenplay’s bigger divots.
In fact, enough of the jokes land that you start questioning reality a little. And that reality is a somewhat notable confluence of events: Cena is at the peak of his comedy powers, the premise is at least a mildly fresh variation on arrested-development junkola, and the world has been dealing with such a marked dearth of R-rated comedies in recent years, you’ll fire up a dipshit movie like this and realize you’re thirsty for Farrelly-style OTT uncouthery, even in its slightly weakened, late-era form. It aims for the sensibilities of aging Gen-Xers yearning for some comedy in the current pre-post-P.C.-whatever context. Nobody will accuse Ricky Stanicky of being great, or anything more than modestly inspired, but I ended up laughing in spite of myself, and there’s significant value in that.
Our Call: Is Farrelly past his prime. Yeah, maybe. But he’s wise enough to get Cena to do the nitty-gritty of making a lackluster yukfest funny enough to warrant a recommendation. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.