Ricky Stanicky
AMAZON
With every Farrelly brother film release, there’s a collective “hold your breath” moment to see if the latest “comedic” enterprise is going to be something akin to Dumber or Dumber To or The Greatest Ever Beer Run. Nothing comes in between the two, either turning out of genuinely terrible or attempted form of brevity and pathos. If it hasn’t been guessed correctly by the title alone – it is a quick and clear giveaway – Ricky Stanicky is an incredibly tired, unfunny and stale 90s comedic sentiment that should and needs to be left in the past, undeniably falling in the aforementioned camp of being genuinely terrible.
To start as this review means to go on, not only is Ricky Stanicky deeply unfunny but it’s also deeply unlikeable; those two elements grate on each other to a point in which it poisons the experience completely. The characters in this story do terrible things, these terrible things are meant to be funny. They aren’t. So the viewer is constantly having to be reinforced by this sense of annoying self-assured humour, which never raises the bar in terms of being just plain stupid or forced comedic moments. To make things worse, it does this throughout its two-hour running time and progressively pushes the audience to witness stupider and more rejective comedic embellishment. Be it circumcision with a cigar cutter or lying to a pregnant partner about a friend dying of cancer. Granted, these comments are presented without further context but the joke presented is just that in the description provided and while this isn’t a woke-like response, it’s just that the comedic nature of this is both barren and uninteresting.
Where does this feature find common ground in detecting comedy in three friends lying to everyone and anyone to get out of meaningful moments through a made-up character who is stricken and then dying of ‘anal cancer’? Where does this find brevity and seriousness in self-reflection and teaching the main characters ultimate life lessons in the end? Well, it doesn’t, it just furthers their respective career endeavours in success. It can’t even write itself in a manner of just teaching its characters’ actions of consequences it’s too incompetent to do the basics of full-circle narrative writing.
The one saving grace here is arguably John Cena in terms of comedic character and entertainment. However, the greatest caveat to this, and an incredibly narrow-minded approach on the filmmaker’s behalf, is that Cena takes the gulf of the comedic landscape here but not in the way arguably intended. While the film and filmmakers think the viewer is laughing at Cena’s character Rod Rimestead and his comedic but often quite tragic endeavours, they are laughing ironically at John Cena himself and what he’s doing on-screen – be it singing about sex jokes or dressing as Britney Spears. It’s all funny, or so is the intention, because it’s John Cena, and the further extent of why that is comedic is because it’s John Cena in a schoolgirl outfit and wig. That seriously is how far the comedy travels here, and it doesn’t travel very well. For the most part, Cena nails what he’s given and laughs are returned for what he puts forward, but the material is never enough to arguably test the wrestler turned actor’s potential and talent to a degree in which this type of material should and could push both Cena and the film itself to a degree of internal and emotive exploration.
Discussing anything else is genuinely pointless, as any other department Ricky Stanicky does little to both impress or push any form of technical or artistic creativity on screen. The visual and artistic merit of composition and scene blocking does little to impress nor even make a claim on screen. Nothing looks particularly good or remotely appealing visually as does the edit which is a fault of this being as long as it is. One aspect of this reason is ultimately a factor of not being able to cut anything out in order to make Ricky Stanicky as a character make sense nor to showcase to the intended audience how funny and cruel these central characters are, thinking of which is what audiences are wanting to see but it is ever so clearly the opposite. Therefore the need to keep everything in actually suffocates and crushes upon its own weight.
Perhaps if released in the late 90s, Ricky Stanicky would have been a cult classic in the making. An understandable choice and reflection of its time but the sentiment and comedic embellishment are neither funny nor entertaining in the world of comedy today. Of which has evolved from a point of both slapstick and whatever this is. Granted, with a far more fleshed out and explored screenplay and writers, the likes of Ricky Stanicky have the potential to subvert expectations or at least showcase brevity and charm in watching these characters fail but pick things back up, rectifying wrongs and understanding terrible actions. Perhaps Ricky Stanicky was purposefully made for audiences wanting to remember and once again relive comedic embellishments of the past, or more so the unabashedly risqué overtones of the the Farrelly’s 90’s work but ironically enough this venture is the clearest and strongest indicator of why those very features and ideas should and need to be left into the past. After both Green Book and The Greatest Ever Beer Run, this might be a palette cleanser for Peter Farrelly who was seemingly on a mature path of wanting to evolve as a filmmaker but with the release of this monstrosity, has set himself back to a degree that nobody will truly know until whatever comes next which is even more frightening to imagine.
