Ricky Stanicky

3 outta 5

Director Peter Farrelly was originally a directing duo with his brother Bobby for movies like Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary, and then Peter directed the Best Picture winning Green Book. And while they have directed separately, its not as if Peter Farrelly has become some sort of respected prestige director or anything. He’s made an AppleTV movie that probably not a lot of people have seen and now the Amazon exclusive comedy Ricky Stanicky. It certainly isn’t a throwback to the Farrelly Brothers’ heyday, this wouldn’t come anywhere near Dumb and Dumber or Kingpin, but it is a funny movie with a very engaging lead performance. It slides into sentimentality at the end, which is a trait Farrelly engages in. There are enough amusingly risqué jokes in here that make it more of a comedy than a sappy experience.

Ever since a childhood prank gone awry three friends, Dean (Zac Effron), Wes (Jermaine Fowler), and JT (Andrew Santino), have been blaming various misdeeds on their imaginary friend, Ricky Stanicky. Lately, the guys want to skip out on the baby shower for JT’s wife, so they say their friend Ricky is battling a terminal illness, when, in reality, they just want to go to Atlantic City for a concert and gambling. There they meet a performer named Rod who has a very edgy and profane musical act, but they find him to be overbearing and annoying. But they rush back to be by JT’s wife’s side when she goes into labour early. When the family members ask why they couldn’t respond, instead of admitting that their friend is a fake, they just dig themselves deeper and say he’ll put in an appearance at the baby’s Bris. Now, scrambling to find a real person to play their fake friend, Dean realizes they can call the performer Rod to pretend to be Ricky. But with Rod’s arrival as Ricky, he suddenly becomes more ingrained in their life, even impressing Dean and JT’s hardcase boss, Summerhays (William H. Macy). And it turns out their fake friend has suddenly become very real, and they can’t get rid of him.

The centre of the movie is Cena’s performance as the bottomed-out performer, Rod, finds a new lease on life by pretending to be Ricky. His act is absolutely terrible and bonkers, with him dressing up as famous musical acts and talking about pleasuring oneself. The variety of different auto-erotic spins he puts in rock music classics is impressive. Also, the reaction shot of the crowd dumbfounded at his act is hilarious. When he first introduces himself to the guys at the bar, he comes off as entertaining, but it quickly gets weird with him starting off doing an Owen Wilson impression which rapidly devolves into him crying about his traumatic childhood.

He’s a full-on raging alcoholic, and the call from the guys is basically a life preserver. They send him a “bible” about the entire history of Ricky (rather convenient that they kept a record of the history of their fake friend but one just has to roll with it) and he sees that Ricky is a recovering alcoholic. Therefore, Rod goes instantly sober for the Bris, but this means he’s vomiting, urinating and getting the shakes as he goes through withdrawal. Cena makes Ron pathetic but when he hits a home run as Ricky, his life gets better, and he literally wants to become a new person.

The trio of guys are fairly standard comedy tropes; arrested development dudes who want to sneak out on responsibility. When Ron shows up, they’re the straight men to Ricky’s antics. Effron as Dean has a couple of great snarky lines, like when Ricky introduces Wes as his “new attaché” and Ricky as if Dean has an attaché and Dean replies, “No, because I’m not a foreign diplomat”. JT seems to need the lie the most, and when the fraud is revealed, his wife punishes him in a funny way. Wes develops an unlikely close friendship with Ricky and Ricky’s rambling actually inspires Wes. When Wes is describing his idea for a children’s book and Ricky shoots it down as a terrible idea, making Wes come up with a better one. As the boss, Macy does the stuck-up guy he does so well, and there’s a running gag that Macy’s Summerhayes keeps inadvertently making a profane gesture whenever he is giving a big speech. When Summerhayes sees this, his reaction is pretty gold, and the best payoff is at the end of the credits there’s a remixed video version of his gesture.

Like in a lot of Farrelly movies, there are convoluted setup gags, like the guys accidentally dosing the guy performing the Bris with ketamine, or a woman with extremely long frayed hair that eventually ends up getting caught in a bowling alley ball dispenser. But by the time the finale rolls around, the gags have gotten less intense, and there is more hugging and learning. It does show that Ricky Stanicky does have a heart. The laughs are not constant but, overall, Stanicky can surprise with over the top craziness.