'Ricky Stanicky' is very unoriginal and pretty funny
Amazon
Perhaps we’ve underestimated the influence of “How I Met Your Mother.” First “Players” seemed blatantly expanded from Barney’s playbook, and now “Ricky Stanicky” saddles Erin (Lex Scott Davis), a female journalist frustrated about only being assigned puff pieces, with the same challenge Robin Scherbatsky faced for years. (Which then popped up in “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” as well.)
Not that the female characters are particularly the point in the latest from director Peter Farrelly (“Green Book,” “Dumb and Dumber To”), which is somewhat unexpectedly his most amusing effort in years. This is largely a movie about a lot of dudes lying, though somehow “Ricky Stanicky” layers the deception with heavy reasons and, arguably, pulls it off. This is almost certainly the most masturbation jokes delivered in a study of trauma, loneliness, and regret. (Don’t ask me to name the runners-up.)
The titular character played by John Cena enters the mayhem when Dean (Zac Efron), JT (Andrew Santino), and Wes (Jermaine Fowler) arrive in Atlantic City claiming, as they have for nearly their entire lives, that their friend Ricky Stanicky, who doesn’t exist, needs something/did something/whatever. It means blowing off the baby shower for JT’s son and encountering Rod Rimestead (Cena), who is currently dedicating his life to a regular show in which he covers hard rock hits with lyrics adjusted to talk about pleasuring himself. This absolutely seems like it wouldn’t work, but Cena’s gleeful innocence, deployed here in an extremely similar way to his good-natured wild card in the “Vacation Friends” movies, almost singlehandedly coats this nonsense in sweet energy. (And no, that’s not a reference to Rod’s singing career.)
Disclaimer: If you watch “Ricky Stanicky” and feel otherwise, this is not a hill I intend to die on or even climb in the slightest. Humor is so subjective — except when it’s mean (aka most modern Adam Sandler comedies), in which case it’s objectively bad.
Blah blah blah, the guys hire Rod to pretend to be Ricky, leading to shenanigans that never lose laughs for too long but also feel just how rickety “Ricky Stanicky” can be as a story while it also bites lame bits from “The League” and errs badly in a repeated joke about a hand gesture performed by the guys’ boss (William H. Macy, somehow). Efron’s also given a stiff role that doesn’t utilize his appeal or his strengths, and it really shouldn’t have taken six credited screenwriters to deliver a movie whose comedic ideas sometimes seem barely a step above the cast shouting “Penis” for five minutes.
And yet, believe it or not, “Ricky Stanicky” finds its way toward something affirming about proactively changing your life, and even its crassness mostly stays on the right side of respectful rather than making someone or a lot of someones the butt of the joke. Call it “Faint Praise: The Movie,” but “I laughed, I groaned, I didn’t regret it,” is praise all the same.
B-
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