Director: Peter Farrelly
Writers: Jeffrey Bushell, Brian Jarvis, James Lee Freeman, Peter Farrelly, Pete Jones, Mike Cerrone
Stars: Zac Efron, John Cena, Jermaine Fowler, Andrew Santino
Synopsis: When three childhood best friends pull a prank that goes wrong, they invent the imaginary Ricky Stanicky to get them out of trouble. Twenty years later, they still use the nonexistent Ricky as a handy alibi for their immature behavior.
One of my bigger gripes with streamers unceremoniously dumping genre fare on their platforms with all the fanfare of a traffic jam is how well many of those films would play in a theater. Of course, many recent titles landed on streaming services partially due to the impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on the moviegoing experience (oh, how I wish I could have seen Palm Springs in a packed picturehouse). But even in the years since cinemas reopened en masse, movies of ostensible theatrical quality have fallen by the wayside in regards to the attention they should receive due a streaming release.
Think about a film like 2022’s Prey, a fresh offering under the Predator umbrella; it was a sneaky hit on Hulu, yet I can’t help but think about the way it would’ve looked on the big screen. Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, a Netflix original, is a curious case study. It received plenty of acclaim, not to mention seven Academy Award nominations, but as someone who saw the film both in a theater and at home, I can confidently assert that it plays significantly better when projected rather than displayed on a television or laptop. I have serious fears for Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, a sexy, uproarious rom-com that premiered to much acclaim at festivals last fall, yet will land on Netflix on June 7 with no accompanying theatrical release, per usual. That film is simply so alive; it begs to be seen with a crowd.
Ricky Stanicky does not.
There’s a bit more to it than that. But perhaps the best way to summarize its potential for such status is by noting that a lot of what Ricky Stanicky feigns to be — not just be about, but be in substance — it screams “theatrical comedy”, provided that we’ve traveled back in time to 2007. I can envision a cast featuring Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, and Danny McBride, or actors of that ilk, playing a trio of successful jamokes who, in their youth, invented an imaginary scapegoat and have let him live on into the present. They have jobs, wives/partners, and adult responsibilities, all of which they are willing to abandon on the condition that they won’t be faulted for said abandonment. Of course, that’s because the blame always falls on Ricky Stanicky. I can see Judd Apatow or Adam McKay mining humor out of this premise, the aforementioned actors making lemonade out of the outwardly-lemonish dick jokes they’ve been served on a platter, and audiences eating it all up.
Maybe these visions of mine carry more weight because that was the intention for the project back when it landed on the 2010 Black List, thus deeming it one of that year’s best unproduced screenplays. Since then, Jim Carrey, James Franco, and Joaquin Phoenix (?!) were all in line to play Ricky, a dubious honor that ultimately went to John Cena. And it’s even more evident that the script has gone through an incessant slew of revisions over time, to the point where it now has six credited writers, as well as two separate “story by” credits for David Occhino and Jason Decker. It’s a patchwork piece at best, which is too bad, considering how much fun Cena is clearly having (and willing to have), and the fact that, in better hands and at a different time, I can genuinely imagine it making just north of a nine-figure box office return.
Instead, it’s 2024, so Ricky Stanicky is littered with stand-up comedians who don’t act so much as they play renamed versions of themselves, directed by Peter Farrelly, and plopped on Amazon Prime, right around the corner from the discount toilet plungers. (I can only assume that a poop joke was left out of Ricky Stanicky’s final cut, though a pee joke made it through the edit alive.) Its footprint, solely digital; its jokes a return to form for Farrelly, who made Green Book and The Greatest Beer Run Ever; and clearly felt he’d done his duty for sincere-ish storytelling and wished to retreat to his dick joke haven.
Zac Efron (Dean) stars as a nothingburger of a hedge fund bro who, along with Andrew Santino (JT) and Jermaine Fowler (Wes), have a get-out-of-jail-free-card for just about anything in the form of the titular character. One of the first examples we see is Dean and JT itching to ditch JT’s baby shower in favor of a Marc Rebillet concert in Atlantic City. How do they get out of the shower? Ricky’s cancer is back; the boys have to head to Albany to be present when he gets out of surgery.
When the dudes are forced to leave their weekend getaway early when JT’s wife goes into labor — darn! — they return to an entourage of dubious family members, who called every hospital in Albany trying to get a hold of one of the guys (they turned their phones off so they couldn’t be tracked), and there was no record of any Ricky or Stanicky anywhere. So, in an effort to keep up appearances with their loved ones, Dean comes up with a bright idea: Why don’t they hire the alcoholic actor they met while at a bar in A.C.? His name is “Rock-Hard” Rod, and while he might not be the best bet at convincing their families of Ricky’s legitimacy, our main men aren’t exactly swimming in options.
Enter Rod, who is just as committed to the bit of being Ricky as Cena is to playing him, but the whole sham these morons cooked up is a disaster waiting to happen. Especially because Rod enjoys being Ricky so much that he won’t take the money and run. Once the gig is up, Rod’s method acting persists; he even gets hired by Dean and JT’s boss, and swiftly receives a title with higher status and pay than the aforementioned duo. Nevermind that Rod’s only true skills are finding ways to sexualize the lyrics to popular rock songs for his one man show — it didn’t make me laugh, but I’d kill to see Peter Frampton’s reaction to Rod singing, “Ooh baby, I masturbate, everyday yeah, yeah”, — because “Ricky” is a jack of all trades. The more Rod hams it up, the further into chaos Dean, JT, and Wes’ lives are thrown.
If only this chaos was handled with any sort of regard for real humor rather than a rapidly-unspooling thread of stale quips and gags. This is the sort of film that is more concerned with how a line reads than how it lands or even relates to the plot; I recall Wes mentioning, “Sometimes I feel like I’m in a gay Handmaid’s Tale”, but what that referenced is of less import to the script than the fact that Wes mentioned a recognizable streaming property. The point — both of this line and the movie as a whole — isn’t to reinvent the wheel, but you’d think it might at least try to split the difference between There’s Something About Mary and Hall Pass.
All this is made infinitely worse by it being the Efron performance immediately following his outstanding turn in last year’s The Iron Claw, a prestige project that saw the otherwise-solid actor reach unforeseen dramatic heights. Not even he can support the movie-stealing work of Cena, an up-for-anything performer who grows as an actor every time he appears on screen. Yet despite his best efforts, the Academy Awards will go down as the funniest thing Cena appears in this month. Somehow, more work went into crafting a gag to accompany the presentation for achievement in Costume Design than into a new feature film from an Oscar winner. If only that was as much of a sham as this.
