There was a time when the Farrelly name was synonymous with humor so lowbrow it was practically subterranean. For three decades, Peter Farrelly and his brother, Bobby, churned out crude hit after crude hit: Dumb & Dumber, Shallow Hal, (There’s Something About Mary, the conjoined twin film Stuck on You. It didn’t get better when Peter broke out on his own to helm the vile anthology Movie 43, a film that caused one to wonder just what heinous dirt the director had on everyone involved. Then, things got really weird: he made 2018’s Green Book, which won Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, and netted Mahershala Ali a Best Supporting Actor trophy, to boot.
Farrelly’s newest film, the goofball comedy Ricky Stanicky, isn’t anywhere near the atrocities of Movie 43 and Shallow Hal, but it will make you yearn for the squicky, vaguely charming dramedy of Green Book at times. Ricky Stanicky tells you everything you need to know about it immediately, when the very first joke involves the child version of JT (Andrew Santino, who made his role in this year’s fertility comedy Scrambled his and his alone) using a retractable red marker to give his dog costume a functional penis. The gags will not get less crude from here — no, not even when Jeff Ross shows up as a mohel who gets dosed with ketamine at a bris.
The plot involves a central trio of friends — JT, Dean (Zac Efron, a long way from The Iron Claw) and Wes (Jermaine Fowler) — who watch as a prank goes awry when a flaming bag of shit left on a doorstep catches a house on fire. Do they take responsibility for their crime? They do not. Instead, they create an imaginary scapegoat, Ricky Stanicky, on whom they pin the blame of a thousand youthful (and then adult) indiscretions, with a Bible of facts to keep track of the decades of character details and events, each one created solely to cover up a broken vase, enable a boys’ trip to Dollywood (twice) or get in a round of golf.
Cut to the present day, and the big Ricky Stanicky lie has landed JT in hot water when the friends’ spontaneous Atlantic City party trip causes him to miss the birth of his child (six weeks early, mind you; should he be blamed for his absence that early?). The trio’s partners have finally begun wonder why they haven’t met this Ricky Stanicky, the frat boy Mothman who’s at the center of so many disasters and absences in their lives.
Enter Rock-Hard Rod (John Cena), the shining beacon at the center of Ricky Stanicky, a casino barfly the boys meet in Atlantic City. Rod is the worst kinda drunken loser you could ask for: He’s sweaty, he reeks of booze, he’s a freeloader so gross that the bartenders won’t even serve him. He’s an adult parody performer and washed-up thespian whose entire act is full of song parodies centered around masturbating (A Devo parody called “Grip It,” a Billy Idol parody called “Wood Whackin,’” you get the idea!). Are his songs clever? Oh, yes, and each one gets a different costume — but they’re all gross as hell. When Dean calls him to ask if he’ll play the role of the “real” Ricky Stanicky at JT’s son’s bris, he’s dressed in a “…Baby One More Time”-era Britney Spears schoolgirl costume, licking the whiskey from a broken bottle off a cardboard box in an alley. With Rod, Farrelly has created a vividly depraved character, and it’s by the sheer grace of Cena’s charisma that you just can’t help but love him.
Everyone else in the movie loves him, too, in his role as the fictional scapegoat. Rod, the failed actor, goes deep into character, sobering up entirely (Ricky’s in AA, after all), memorizing facts, and learning about complex business strategies and environmental activism within a few days. It’s all a little too magical; he dodges every trap, he fixes every relationship and he dunks on the one person who seems to doubt him most. He even steps in to perform some frontier surgery with a cigar cutter at one point. In short, he makes the charade a rousing success.
“What? That’s the whole movie?” you may ask yourself. “What about all the friction and mayhem?” Well, it turns out that Rod, like many method actors, has a questionable grip on sanity. He assumes the “identity” of Ricky, getting hired by Dean’s boss (William H. Macy, inexplicably) and engaging Wes to be his assistant. While Ricky Stanicky isn’t a good film, this section of the movie is unquestionably the most unexpected. For the gang, Ricky exists as a Get Out of Jail Free card, but for Rod, he represents the ability to start again and be something more than the steroid-addicted alcoholic who sings Bonnie Tyler parodies about coming on your stomach.
The relatability of Rod’s desire to be someone else makes Ricky Stanicky a lot more interesting than it has any right to be. It’s hard to ignore the fact that this is just not a good movie, but it’s also easy to see how a different director might have turned this same story into something really remarkable. Do we need Jeff Ross as a rabbi? Absolutely not — but against all odds, the rest of this film feels like it has a real beating heart. It falters when it tries to get too schmaltzy (we get an 11th-hour explanation for why Ricky took hold as a recurring scapegoat for Dean that comes off as tacky), but when it finds the middle path between “masturbation puns crammed into beloved radio hits” and “shoehorned-in abuse backstories,” you can see some surprising mastery at work. It’s not enough to make this a great movie, or even a good one, but it’s damn watchable.
In the best and worst of ways, it feels like a return to the days of Me, Myself, & Irene and Shallow Hal, though without anywhere near the same levels of problematic gross-out garbage (which exists here at times, but in a far mellower vein). Farrelly gives us the crude jokes and the heartwarming, twisted moral of the story, just like every gross comedy in his oeuvre and in similar work by Adam Sandler or even the radioactive Rob Schneider. If not for the sheer magnetism of Cena, the film would probably feel kind of unwatchable. Thanks to him, though, maybe you’ll stick with it to see if it has anything else to offer — yes, even beyond the dog-boner jokes or cigar-cutter circumcisions.
Photo courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
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