John Cena is the saving grace of idiotic comedy Ricky Stanicky

After years of making shamelessly idiotic comedies like Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, and Shallow Hal, writer/director Peter Farrelly made the improbable switch to Oscar bait movies with Green Book in 2018, somehow winning Oscars in the process. Now that he’s got that out of his system, he’s back with yet another idiotic comedy, Ricky Stanicky.

This one centers on three childhood friends - Dean (Zac Efron), JT (Andrew Santino), and Wes (Jermaine Fowler) – who, for over 20 years, have been using a fake friend they named Ricky Stanicky to either blame for their wrongdoing or as an excuse to get out of something they don’t want to do. The film kicks off with one such scheme, with the three bailing on a baby shower for JT’s wife, Susan (Anja Savcic), to go to Atlantic City.

While there, they meet Rod (John Cena), a low-rent actor who does a show featuring parody songs that are all about masturbating. When the baby comes early and the guys have to rush home, their significant others start to get extra suspicious. In order to keep the lie going, they hire Rod to play Ricky for a day, but they are unprepared for how deeply Rod will inhabit a character that has only existed in their minds until now.

Directed by Farrelly and written by Farrelly and five other writers, the film is mostly the equivalent of a flaming poop trick, a grotesque adolescent prank that Farrelly uses to establish the personalities of the three main characters. The film is full of random stupid jokes that don’t advance the plot in the slightest, like JT’s new baby sucking on his nipple, Wes talking about buying pot milk, or a duck trying to drown Dean and Erin’s dog.

If there is a saving grace to the film, it’s Cena, who commits fully to the role of Rod/Ricky. He garners a few chuckles with a montage of Rod’s parody masturbation songs (song choice and costumes are key), but his pièce de résistance is an extended sequence when he’s introduced as Ricky at the bris for JT’s baby. The way he’s able to charm almost everybody at the party is a sight to see, and even though each conversation is a version of the same joke, they all work well.

Unfortunately, Farrelly tries to dip into the same well for most of the rest of the film, with diminishing returns. The main trio never truly feels like a group of best friends, and throwing Rod into the mix only serves to enhance how uninteresting they are. The same goes for their significant others, who only seem to exist in order to have a source of conflict, and they barely function as that.

The film would be completely unwatchable without Cena, as he gives it a boost of personality that the three leads do not possess, at least not here. Efron, as seen in the Neighbors films, has comic chops, but Farrelly gives him almost nothing to do. Santino stood out in the recent Scrambled, but he too is inert in this film. Fowler has the most thankless role, as he’s only given one scene where his character is the focus. Even William H. Macy as a blowhard boss doesn’t register.

Farrelly rode the wave of outrageous comedies in the ‘90s and early 2000s, but his ability to wring humor out of inane situations has seemed to pass him by. Ricky Stanicky is a one-joke story with only a couple of memorable sequences, not nearly enough to justify the effort it takes to watch it.

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Ricky Stanicky is now streaming on Prime Video.