At the beginning of “Ricky Stanicky,” our three protagonists find themselves in a bit of a pickle. Having decided to exact revenge on a house that doesn’t give out Halloween candy, Dean, Wes and JT leave the owners a smelly little doorstep delight – and by delight, I mean dog poop.
They also decide to set said dog poop on fire, which, of course, doesn’t go as well as originally planned. With the fire department on its way, the boys panic and leave a burned-up jacket with a fake name written on the collar to throw the cops off their scent – Ricky Stanicky. As the boys watch the authorities ponder over the identity of their made-up arsonist, JT breathlessly says: “I can’t believe that actually worked.”
Honestly? Me neither. Because 25 years later, the Ricky Stanicky bit is still alive and kicking for these childhood best friends. But unfortunately for the movie of the same name, the jig is up pretty quickly.
Directed by Peter Farrelly, “Ricky Stanicky” is a throwback to the R-rated comedies of the mid-2000s, singularly focused on the bad behavior of overgrown man children. But unlike the most successful versions of that type of film, “Ricky Stanicky” is a stiff, humorless drone of a film, lacking any sort of comic timing, tone or creativity.
As the movie goes on, Ricky evolves from a troublemaker to a do-gooder type. He’s no longer a way for Dean (Zac Efron), JT (Andrew Santino) and Wes (Jermaine Fowler) to get out of trouble, but rather an excuse for them to get away from their significant others and blow off some steam. If the three want to go to the Little League World Series, they tell everyone Ricky has invited them to help clean up a riverbank. If they want to go to a show out of town, they tell everyone Ricky’s cancer has come back and they have to go visit him. Has anyone besides the three of them ever actually tried to meet Ricky, you ask? No, but that’s because his job tends to have him working out of Nairobi, so he’s only in the country for short periods of time.
But everyone is starting to grow a little weary of the elusive Ricky, especially after one of his appearances causes JT to miss the birth of his son. So, Dean has the genius idea to hire an out-of-work actor named Rod (John Cena) that the trio met during one of their Ricky-involved escapades to play the part.
On paper, this doesn’t sound like it would be a complete disaster – although I am bumping up a bit against the idea that these guys feel they must make up a fake man with fake cancer rather than tell their partners they would like to go to Atlantic City for a night (seriously guys, dream bigger). But the content of the jokes and the way the plot unfolds in “Ricky Stanicky” feels like something straight from the mind of a 12 year old, but with considerably less ingenuity.
This lack of imagination is evident from the very first time the trio meet Rod. Rod moonlights as Rock Hard Rod, an X-rated rock and roll singer, and there are jokes galore about not touching his “jizz hand,” as well as a few about how he sings “jizz jams.” Rather than actually trying to come up with some quality jokes for this admittedly not-bad bit, it feels like the writers instead tried to see how many terms they could come up with that use the word “jizz.”
A little later on, Rod does a couple of celebrity impersonations for the guys. While John Cena does do a pretty good Owen Wilson, his next impression is of his mother verbally abusing him. While there certainly are ways for movies like these to dabble into dark humor, “Ricky Stanicky” strikes an unnerving tone, to say the least, whenever it tries. Rod is an alcoholic who tries to quit cold turkey to play the part of the sober Ricky, and when the trio pick him up at the airport, he’s a twitchy, sweaty mess going through withdrawal. It’s a moment that is clearly meant to be laughed at, but while the things coming out of Cena’s mouth are absurd, he’s playing the symptoms pretty straight. By the time he pees on himself in the middle of baggage claim, it’s not so much funny as it is excruciating.
Even the few funny moments in the film tend to fall flat because they look flat. There are a few montages throughout the film where we’re privy to sections of Rock Hard Rod’s act, and the boner-related rock and roll parodies he sings (in full costume) are some of the looser, sillier bits the film has to offer. But these sequences, much like the rest of the film, have the production value of a Mastercard commercial. Part of me thinks “Ricky Stanicky” might have been at least a tolerable watch if it had any texture to it, anything visually interesting to look at whatsoever. But then I remember the phrase “jizz jams,” and I think, eh – perhaps not.
