Don’t you love it when a movie you expect to be poop turns out to be gold?
Well, ok, silver. Alright, bronze. Still worth a watch though.
BQB here with a review.
When I read the premise of Amazon’s “Ricky Stanicky,” I thought it sounded very stupid indeed. Three young friends in the late 1990s blame all of their mischief on an imaginary friend named Ricky Stanicky. Teachers. Cops. Parents. Angry neighbors. Whenever the boys are in trouble, the boys simply tell them that Ricky Stanicky did whatever rotten deed just transpired and even worse, he just ran that-away. The adults have a scapegoat to blame and the boys are off the hook, scot-free. The rouse works so well that they continue their fake friendship with “Ricky” well into their adulthood, imagining wild and crazy stories of stupid things that Ricky did to explain to their wives, families, co-workers and bosses why they can’t do something, be somewhere, or take part in some dumb thing they really don’t want to do. “Oh sorry, I’d really love to go to your boring thing but you’ll never believe what that jackass Stanicky roped me into.” Works like a charm.
Alas, the jig is up when the friends overplay their hand in adulthood. Friends Dean (Zac Efron), JT (Andrew Santino) and Wes (Jermaine Fowler) claim Ricky is desperately clinging onto life due to a raging case of testicular cancer and needs his bros to fly to their side. In reality, they’re flying to Atlantic City to party hearty rather than attend JT’s wife’s baby shower.
When Mrs. JT goes into labor early, Wes cracks under pressure and almost confesses to the lie but Dean saves the day and explains that Ricky made the whole ball cancer thing up just to get the bros to come visit him to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the removal of his previous ball, also from ball cancer, and apparently the boys invent lies about Ricky’s gonads to get out of doing stuff a lot. Now non-existent Ricky is in the doghouse and Dean and JT’s wives want to give the prick a piece of their minds. Thus, they demand the friends produce Ricky in the flesh at once so they can chew his ass out and rip him a new one.
This is a tall order since Ricky is imaginary, but leave it to sleazy lounge singer Rod Rimestead (John Cena) to save the day. The bro-heims hire Rod to pose as the Rickster and take the fall.
All seems well except Rod’s personal life sucks so bad that he actually enjoys being Ricky so much that he fully embraces the imaginary life the boys have built for Ricky over the course of several years, wielding these lies to get a big time job, make lots of money and friends, completely invade their world and refuse to go away. This might sound far-fetched, but in today’s social media age, maybe it isn’t, for the lads have spent years building Ricky a robust social media presence full of tales of impressive globe trotting adventures, which Rod (as Ricky) uses to woo and impress his way to the top.
Thus the boys are left with a conundrum – how to extricate this poser from their lives without confessing to their own complicity in the fraud?
As I watched this film, I felt a certain sense of familiarity. The completely ridiculous premise that the film sticks to like glue, no matter how absurd it gets. The potty humor. The Providence, RI setting. “Boy, this sure feels a lot like one of those old Farrelly Bros comedies from the late 90s and early 2000s that I used to know and love.”
Sure enough, it was. Turns out that Prime gave on of the Bros a deal and said bro still walks the walk of old school gross out comedy, no easy task in today’s hyper woke age. Older folks like me who remember when comedy films used to be funny will enjoy this one.
True, it’s silly. It won’t go down in history. It will be forgotten in 6 months but its pretty solid with some decent gut busting laughs. Its worth your time.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy.
Bookshelf Battle 