RICKY STANICKY - Mark Reviews Movies

Ricky Stanicky, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 6, 2024

There are few good jokes in Ricky Stanicky, but there are also a few more decent setups to gags that don't pay off as well. In fact, the whole movie is one solid setup, involving a group of friends who try to make a big lie a reality and suffer the consequences, that isn't nearly as satisfying as the central idea is clever.

The premise sees a trio of pals who have known each other since childhood. As kids in a prologue, their Halloween prank goes horribly awry, leading to accidental arson and the certainty that they'll get in serious trouble if anyone knows they're ones responsible. On a whim, they decide to blame a sort of imaginary friend with the ludicrous name "Ricky Stanicky." The comedic logic that no one—not even the one character who later suspects that the three guys have invented a person to get out of things—even questions that decidedly odd name is pretty funny, without even being a legitimate joke.

That's part of the disappointment here, because the movie was co-written and directed by Peter Farrelly, one half of the fraternal duo of filmmakers who more or less invented the gross-out comedies of the 1990s. Their efforts, for better and worse, were more than that description, of course, and after professionally separating and heading in different directions, Farrelly returns to his first straight-up comedy in about a decade with this one.

Just in that prologue, hints of Farrelly's better comedic times are definitely here, such as how everyone accepts that a man with an unlikely rhyming name exists and a throwaway line about how the prank that starts a life of deception in motion wasn't justified in the first place. The rest of the material is hit or miss, and eventually, the misses win.

The actual story finds lifelong friends Dean (Zac Efron), JT (Andrew Santino), and Wes (Jermaine Fowler) having used Ricky Stanicky as an excuse for getting out of trouble or undesirable situations for decades. They've even created a bible with all of the lies they've told about the fake guy, who, this time, has a recurrence of cancer so that the three can get out of a baby shower and attend a concert in Atlantic City.

By the way, the party is for the approaching arrival of JT's first child, and in case it isn't clear yet, these guys aren't exactly sympathetic types. That's kind of the point, of course, because it's funnier to watch characters with severe flaws of personality and morality get their comeuppance.

Plus, these three aren't smart enough to keep up the history of lies they've told over the years. The combination works, and Efron, Santino, and Fowler play distinct, conflicting characters with the kind of rough chemistry that sometimes makes us wonder how they're still friends. If anything, Farrelly, along with a team of—somehow—five other writers, go out of their way to deny us the catharsis of retribution for the trio by trying to make them somewhat sympathetic in assorted ways.

Anyway, the Atlantic City excursion goes off without a hitch—until there's a big one. JT's wife Susan (Anja Savcic) went into labor while all of the friends' cellphones were turned off, and now, everyone is especially keen to meet the man who caused them all to miss this vital event.

Luckily, a chance encounter on the trip gives Dean a plan. They'll hire an actor to play Ricky Stanicky, fool their loved ones and others, and give the three yet another out for their misdeeds.

That actor is Rod, played by John Cena with a very funny air of misguided confidence and complete desperation. His current gig is performing parody songs that transform the lyrics of popular tunes into odes to masturbation. A montage of those ditties might be the most successful gag in the whole movie, if only because the quick string of them lowers any defense one may have to juvenile humor. At his best, Farrelly is skilled at catching the audience off guard in just that way.

From there in the story, the movie pretty much comes down to two extended sequences of the guys' lie coming under threat and Rod, now "Ricky Stanicky" (and, after going full Method, actually Ricky Stanicky), being put into situations that the struggling actor wouldn't seem capable of handling. One of those is the celebration of the bris for JT's newborn, where the friends have to juggle inconsistences in their own stories and Rod's interpretation of their fake pal, keep Rod away from a fellow actor he recognizes, and end up unintentionally putting the rabbi into a state that isn't ideal for such a sensitive procedure. The momentum of the lengthy scene at least keeps us distracted from how the various—and admittedly clever—setups don't really lead to punch lines.

The other is far less successful, still, as Dean and JT's boss (played by William H. Macy, that best of self-deprecating sports) thinks Ricky Stanicky would be a good fit for the company. At this point, it becomes clear that Ricky Stanicky doesn't know where to take this material, and the shenanigans struggle before turning to sentimentality that's both unearned and, for this scenario, wholly misguided.

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