John Cena is Fun But Ricky Stanicky Is Over-plotted and Underwhelming
Welcome to the latest entry in The Great Catch-Up, a column in which patrons of this site’s Patreon account force me to see an important movie that I missed for no good reason at the time of its release.
The Peter Farrelly-based poll pitted his Academy Award-winning 2018 drama Green Book against The Greatest Beer Run Ever and this year’s Ricky Stanicky. I very much expected Green Book to win because, as a Best Picture winner, it matters in a way that the other two movies do not.
I was dreading Green Book because it looks like the kind of condescending, wildly inaccurate, self-regarding, and mildly racist middlebrow monstrosity I abhor. I have a very strong suspicion that I will despise Green Book should I ever see it.
I’m not entirely sure why anyone voted for Ricky Stanicky, except that Green Book has been written about to death, while Ricky Stanicky is more recent and obscure.
Ricky Stanicky’s gimmicky plot about a trio of bro friends who make up the titular imaginary pal to get out of dreary obligations and end up hiring an actor to play the fictional chum, a ruse that takes on a life of its own, is both its biggest strength and weakness.
Ricky Stanicky’s a high-concept premise that landed it and screenwriter Jeffrey Bushell on the Black List of the best unproduced screenplays all the way back in 2010. Since then everyone from Jim Carrey to James Franco to Joaquin Phoenix was considered for the title role before John Cena.
The Black List is full of screenplays that read well and boast an element of novelty that radiates promise on the page and die slow, awkward, agonizing deaths onscreen.
To me, the ultimate Black List movie is The Beaver, the poorly received dark comedy where Mel Gibson deals with suicidal depression by communicating to the world through a beaver puppet.
The screenplay The Beaver deserves credit for originality and audacity, but as a blueprint for an actual motion picture, it was a unique combination of implausible and impossible.
When Ricky Stanicky hit Amazon a mere fourteen years after its Black List honor, Bushell was one of eight credited writers. It saddens me to think that the end result did not exclusively represent the creative vision of Bushell, a kiddie sitcom veteran whose only previous screenwriting credit was for Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
That’s right: eight writers worked on the film’s screenplay, including director Peter Farrelly and Project Spotlight winner Pete Jones.
I’d love to say that the screenwriting army behind this film spent nearly a decade and a half diligently refining the script until it achieved a level of perfection rarely seen onscreen.
That, unfortunately’s not the case. The movie has the simultaneously bland and overstuffed quality of something that has been rewritten so often and by so many people that it lacks any real personality.
In a 2010 Variety article about Jim Carrey's coming on board to star in Ricky Stanicky, it was described as “an ensemble comedy in the vein of The Hangover” about three brothers whose “girlfriends and wives” want to meet the enigmatic/non-existent figure playing havoc with their lives, forcing the dudes to hire an out-of-work actor to play the part.
Jim Carrey and Steve Oedekerk ended up having nothing to do with Ricky Stanicky, and in the film, two of the bros use Ricky Stanicky as a “get out of trouble free” card with their girlfriend and wife, but the third uses the phantom friend to deceive his boyfriend.
In what can only be deemed a milestone in queer cinema, Ricky Stanicky has a black gay protagonist who is every bit as bland and generic as his heterosexual counterparts.
The movie boldly asserts that people of color and homosexuals can be dull bros just out to party and deceive their partner, just like straight white frat bros.
Zac Efron, Farrelly’s The Greatest Beer Run Ever lead, stars as Dean, a dull businessman and longtime best friend of coworker JT (Andrew Santino) and Wes (Jermaine Fowler), who breaks new ground in broad comedies by being gay and black in a wholly uninteresting way.
In Ricky Stanicky, the bros score tickets to see loop-crazy, bathrobe-clad weirdo Marc Rebillet in concert. They’re so excited that they decide to skip the baby shower for JT and his wife’s future child.
They once again use Ricky Stanicky as an excuse, explaining that his cancer has returned and he wants to be with the people closest to him. This speaks to one of the primary weaknesses of the trio of friends: they’re all unlikable assholes it’s difficult to identify with or root for. They honestly seem like three variations on the same lame dude.
In Atlantic City, they meet a gentleman who performs masturbation-themed parodies of pop songs. John Cena graduates from “funny for a wrestler” and “funny for an action star” to just plain being funny in the juicy role of a drunken trainwreck of a human being who morphs unexpectedly into the image of perfection when he sobers up.
JT refers to Rock Hard Rob as “Weird Al” Wankovic, a line that’s almost funny in a movie that’s short on out and out laughs but convoluted to a maddening extent.
When the bros’ partners want to meet someone they’ve heard wild stories about for years, the trio hires Cena’s desperate pop parodist/impersonator to play Ricky Stanicky.
The scheming pals have created a “Ricky Stanicky Bible” containing all the lies they’ve told through the decades. It would, of course, be much easier to be honest and risk occasionally hurting feelings than maintain an elaborate fiction along with two others so involved that they need a goddamn bible just to keep everything straight.
The bros expect the worst from Rod. They are astonished when he gets sober and doesn’t just play Ricky Stanicky; he becomes Ricky Stanicky, to the point that he has difficulty understanding where he ends and the character begins.
In a scene that would be iconic and a standout if this were a Something About Mary or Dumb and Dumber-level slapstick classic instead of overplotted and mediocre, the guys accidentally end up drugging a quip-happy mohel played by Jeffrey Ross.
When he proves too incapacitated to perform the bris, Ricky Stanicky steps in and circumcises the baby with a cigar cutter. That proves only the beginning of the character’s surprises. He turns out to be something of an intuitive genius with an astonishing, literally unbelievable array of skills and talent.
“Ricky Stanicky” is so extraordinary that Dean and JT’s uptight boss Ted Summerhayes (William H. Macy, picking up a paycheck) hire him to work alongside them for a quarter million dollars a year.
Things only get more unnecessarily complicated from there. There are a whole lot of subplots involving mergers and business and other horseshit you find in comedies like these that add nothing but unnecessary length to a movie that has no excuse to be longer than ninety speedy minutes but instead runs a bloated 114 minutes.
Ricky Stanicky would need to be hilarious to get away with a premise that’s implausible to an insulting and distracting extent. Unfortunately, Farrelly’s comedy is never particularly funny, let alone guffaw-inducing enough to justify its premise.
I love my patrons. They are few yet mighty. I do not understand, however, why they voted for this over Green Book. It’s a movie that fundamentally does not matter, a superficial time-waster with nothing on its mind.
Cena throws himself into the role with lunatic conviction. He’s far and away the best part of the movie, but his performance has the unfortunate distinction of being funny in an unfunny film.
The grappler-turned-actor doesn’t just have the best lines; he has the only halfway funny dialogue.
Cena is a lot of fun in the title role but there’s just nothing about Ricky Stanicky.
Nathan recently got life-changing but extremely expensive dental implants and his insurance doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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