RICKY STANICKY (2024) - Movie Review

Director: Peter Farrelly
Starring: Zac Efron, John Cena, Jermaine Fowler, Andrew Santino, Lex Scott Davis, Anja Savcic, Jeff Ross, William H. Macy
Genre: Comedy
Writer: Jeff Bushell, Brian Jarvis, James Lee Freeman, Peter Farrelly, Pete Jones, Mike Cerrone
Runtime: 113 min
Rated: Rated R for sexual material, language throughout and some drug content
Buy This Movie: Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV

This blog is supported by its audience. When you buy through links on my blog, I may earn an affiliate commission.

Synopsis:

When three childhood friends pull a prank gone wrong, they invent the imaginary Ricky Stanicky to get them out of trouble! Twenty years later, they still use the nonexistent Ricky as an alibi for their immature behavior. When their families get suspicious and demand to meet the fabled Mr. Stanicky, the guilty trio decide to hire a washed-up actor and celebrity impersonator to bring him to life.

Review:

After directing the awards darling "Green Book" and the somewhat interesting "The Greatest Beer Run Ever", Peter Farrelly went back to his R-rated comedy roots with "Ricky Stanicky". Honestly, I'm a fan of the Farrelly brothers' comedy brand, and I was excited to see if the formula would work with only half of the comedy mastermind duo. I knew going in that Farrelly humor is a tricky thing, a love it or hate it deal, but I never expected the movie to be this dull and humorless.

The script apparently needed no less than six writers, including Farrelly, to bang out almost two hours of inane jokes. The fact that this movie runs so long is the cruelest joke of them all. It takes almost a full hour for the premise to start kicking in, and by that time I was already checked out. The movie was stuck in development hell for 14 years, but apparently nobody spent any time tweaking the script and trimming it down for a leaner running time.

The three protagonists are incredibly dull and unfunny. Zac Efron is okay, not great, but passable. Andrew Santino and Jermaine Fowler, on the other hand, are completely miscast. There's no chemistry between the three characters which makes it hard to see them as childhood friends. Even during their solo scenes, they almost never get anything funny to say or do. At best, I got a chuckle or two at some stupid lines.

The only bright spots in this mess are John Cena and William H. Macy, who lean hard into the material they're given to work with and have some genuine fun with the silly gags. Their enthusiasm is pretty contagious and helps salvage this from being a total disaster. Jeff Ross appears briefly as a rabbi in a scene that almost looks like it could go somewhere, but gets quickly shut down before anything funny happens.

Farrelly movies effortlessly find humor in the most outragous and inappropriate scenarios imaginable, and when it works it's hilarious precisely because it catches you off guard. A kind of "Oh, no they didn't" reaction. But nothing of the sort happens in "Ricky Stanicky". Oh, it's certainly raunchy and revels in gross humor, but still seems afraid to take it too far, ending up just a middle-of-the-road comedy. And whatever emotional core was supposed to be there, is completely ruined by phony heartfelt interactions.

The end result is a bland, mostly unfunny movie, with a couple of okay performances. It's hard to believe this is what they could come up with after 14 years of development. It's not a bad premise, on the contrary, it's just poorly executed. Even if you already own a Prime Video subscription I can't recommend this. Just go back and watch something that the Farrellys made in the 1990s or early 2000s.

SCORE: 5/10