Review: ‘Ricky Stanicky’s delightfully watchable John Cena not enough to overcome its multi-pronged laziness

The premise of Prime Video’s new comedy flick Ricky Stanicky involves a group of guys who largely can’t be bothered to treat what they have (which they mostly don’t deserve) with respect, and continue to indulge in an insincere copout strategy that maybe once worked for them before, but has long since outgrown whatever healthy usefulness it may have had in the past.

The real-life production of Ricky Stanicky, I assume, involves a group of guys who largely can’t be bothered to treat what they have with respect, and thereby choose to indulge in insincere copout strategies that maybe made the creation process a bit easier, but also made the outcome far worse than it could have been.

Indeed, there’s so much to be said about the nuances of comedy films, and Ricky Stanicky, with its fun-filled premise, blueprint of a big heart, and egregiously poor ability to seemingly even comprehend comedic timing, serves as an excellent example for both how genuinely empowering the genre can be, and how frustrating it is when it seems dead set on being anything but that.

First, the basics: Ricky Stanicky is about a group of three friends, Dean (Zac Efron), Wes (Jermaine Fowler), and JT (Andrew Santino), who together created a rambunctious fictional character named Ricky Stanicky during their childhood, and then proceeded to blame “Ricky” whenever the three found themselves in trouble or needed an excuse to be absent for whatever reason. This lie has followed them well into adulthood—careers, marriages, fatherhood in JT’s case—and finally comes to a front when they’re forced to hire an amateur actor (John Cena) to portray Ricky, after which the situation, like all enterprises built on a lie, only escalates from there.

Now, there are plenty of cases of actors that manage to carry a movie on all their own, but the appropriately muscular John Cena absolutely deadlifts Ricky Stanicky. The wrestler-turned-James Gunn regular may not have found himself with the most challenging role in Ricky, but the actor brings a gloriously reckless charisma to the character that one absolutely can’t help but be entertained by. Unfortunately, Cena’s top-notch screen presence perhaps also further spotlights just how weak the film around him is.

The direst example of that is the fact that Ricky Stanicky has six screenwriting credits, and the clumsiness of the resulting humor (which, above all else, needs to be unified if you want to have any shot at scoring the laughs) implied by that fact is so grossly in-your-face that it blows right past being an individual weakness, and instead plays a role in dragging down the film’s other pieces as well, most all of which already weren’t terribly impressive to begin with, so to speak.

Indeed, if you’re going to have a scene in your movie that’s meant to be read as oblivious cringe committed by the character (namely, the Ricky actor’s spoof musical act where he takes popular songs and reimagines them as masturbation anthems, Weird Al style), maybe make sure you’re not obliviously cringe yourself; at the very least, make the humor make sense instead of just throwing an uncooked noodle at the wall and acting surprised when it doesn’t stick (i.e. don’t try to pass off Wes as the cerebral weak link in one throwaway moment when he quite consistently proves to be the sage of the group).

What’s more frustrating than the failure of the humor is how easy it is to see much better alternatives; if you’re like me, for instance, you can see the potential of the film in a world where Ricky Stanicky took a page out of John Cena’s performance.

What do I mean by that? The joy of watching Cena’s Ricky mostly comes down to when he’s spitting complicated, charismatic madness with the very believable, dexterous investment of a down-on-his-luck actor in need of a paycheck, or even a conman being held at gunpoint. Conversely, the web of fiction surrounding Ricky as a fictional person is only ever implied to be complicated, with offhand references to the “Ricky Stanicky bible” and his many false humanitarian endeavors being our only leads, and so we never actually see the lie in its truest form (how’s that for an oxymoron?).

Why not, then, show us the collaborative, probably out-of-control creative process that Dean, JT, and Wes utilize to craft what’s no doubt the absolute gongshow of a mythology that brought and continues to bring Ricky to proverbial life? Surely that would be far more entertaining than beat after beat of unfocused, poorly-timed one-liners (most of which fell on the shoulders of an unfortunate Santino); at the very least, it wouldn’t have been less entertaining, and would have formed a mobius strip of creative justice with Cena’s performance.

And yet, one might be willing to forgive the comedic failures in this comedy film if it at least tried to do something admirable with its very admirable moral heart. At the risk of sounding reductive, the lesson you take from Ricky Stanicky is that you always have a chance to be a better person than you were yesterday. That’s a fantastic message, so why not treat it with the respect it deserves?

Indeed, these three grown men have proven throughout their lives that they have the capacity for effort necessary to craft a very complicated lie (effort that, again, we would have certainly benefitted from seeing, especially in the case of this point), and yet, they put so little of that effort towards the things that truly do matter in their lives (their partners, in particular), and instead put it towards fibbing their way into as many childish sugar rushes as possible.

That’s a choice they consciously made; forget the cheap violent-parent backstories, forget the fact that they (accidentally) turned this actor’s life completely around for the better, and forget the fact that, at their purest core, all of these men are good people. Choices have consequences, and these deceitful choices need consequences beyond your spouse quietly but devastatingly chewing you out in and around the film’s final third, only for her to promise an attempt at reconciliation that ties up that conflict by the end; an attempt that’s implied to end in success, no less.

I’ll say it again; it’s important that these consequences are actually, tangibly consequential to make the growth from one’s mistakes read as impactful. “It would have sucked for Dean if his wife left him” and “Dean having his wife leave him wouldn’t have to constitute an in-canon fail state, and can in fact be a bitter catalyst for Dean to do better in the future” are two statements that can coexist quite healthily. It’s not always enough to inhabit the body of a good person; the pride of one’s goodness comes from consciously exercising that trait, and checking it when it needs to be checked.

And in saying that, Ricky Stanicky just didn’t check any of itself enough to earn the merits it could have otherwise snagged by the armful; the humor was misguided and exhausting, the heart was disappointingly unrealized, and despite Cena’s sparkling MVP turn, the world in which Ricky Stanicky soars is, like the titular character, sadly just a figment of our imaginations.