After winning multiple Oscars in 2024, Peter Farrelly has taken an intriguing direction in his career. The Greatest Beer Run Ever was an attempt to make another quirky dramedy in a setting that could be considered for awards, but the release was lackluster and really never got a fair shake from critics (although audiences really liked it) because of the backlash to Green Book. For Ricky Stanicky, Farrelly returns to his roots in pure comedy, and he somehow created one of the funniest films of the past couple years. It is a throwback to 90s/early 00s comedy when there was actually an audience and taste for things that are funny.
Ricky Stanicky follows three guys Dean (Zac Efron), Wes (Jermaine Fowler), and JT (Andrew Santino), who have been best friends since their childhood. Back when they were kids, they pulled a Halloween prank that turned into a disaster, and they inadvertently stumbled upon a brilliant idea of creating an imaginary fourth best friend named Ricky Stanicky, who they would use as the guy they could blame whenever one of them gets in trouble, needs an excuse to do something, and really just a scapegoat to avoid ever having to take responsibility for anything.
Now that they are adults, they have a dilemma. JT’s wife is due to have a child, but the three of them really want to go to a concert in Atlantic City. They use Stanicky once again, and they head out of town to be with him through his “cancer”. There, they meet Rock-Hard Rod (John Cena), a Vegas-style performer/actor who dresses up and sings pornographic parodies of popular songs. Back in Rhode Island, their families are getting suspicious of Stanicky, since none of them have ever met him. They cook up the idea to hire Rod to come and play Stanicky at JT’s kid’s Bris, and the lies and everything related to Stanicky are on full display and in the crosshairs.
This is a pretty brilliant setup for comic misadventures. The role of Rod/Stanicky is a tricky one, and it could make or break the movie. It needs to be a really talented actor, since the comic timing mixed with the shifts to actual engaging scene-stealing acting is required. The role was reportedly given to James Franco around 2010, when the movie was first pitched. It was then passed to Joaquin Phoenix at that weird time in his career. Then Jim Carrey signed on to reunite with Farrelly. Then Nicolas Cage before the movie was shelved for a while. Farrelly wins an Oscar, then go figure we end up with John Cena. He is not on the level of those actors, clearly, but he has proven in movies like Trainwreck that he has real acting chops while being completely silly most of the time. He kills it in Ricky Stanicky, and it is absolutely one of the Jason Momoa in Fast X-type role that we will all be fond of and remember throughout the whole year, a performance that had no business being as effective as it was. Efron is essentially playing the straight one in this movie, and when I read that the movie was first pitched in 2010, it was clear that he was the Jason Bateman role. Santino was the Jason Sudeikis. Fowler was the Craig Robinson. It would have worked. Here, we get an interesting mix in actors. Efron is showing that he is a potentially great leading man. Santino is a stand-up comedian who has now been in two underrated 2024 films (Scrambled being the other), and Fowler is probably most known for The Blackening, at least recently. I was not familiar with his work. The three of them are believable together and all bring something unique to their characters. William H. Macy is hilarious in this as the boss to Dean and JT, and Jeff Ross is also in this as a rabbi. Yes, Rabbi Jeff Ross (below). The movie has tons of highlights, most of which are centered around Cena. His song and dance performances are ridiculous, but they are absolutely something I would have killed to see one of those A-list actors mentioned before tackling. The scene where Cena first shows up at the Bris in full method acting (sober) and just owns the entire party shows that Cena really has the whole package. He plays the part of an actor who was never going to get the role of a lifetime but was absolutely capable of delivering it if he wasn’t stuck singing “Spooge Out My Penis” in full Alice Cooper garb. Ricky Stanicky highlights something that I find incredibly fascinating. The Farrelly brothers have split up, and they are making their own films. Last year, we got a Bobby Farrelly film called Champions, which was surprisingly funny and treated really touchy material with authenticity and heart. And it was genuinely funny. That is what Bobby brought to the group, while with Peter it is clear that he had the filmmaking talent while also being the one with the sophomoric sense of humor. Shift the conversation to the Coen brothers, and we see something much different. Joel is the masterful filmmaker who is interested in the craftsmanship of the film, while Ethan was clearly the goof. After the disaster that was Drive-Away Dolls and Joel’s incredibly cold The Tragedy of Macbeth, we see that they need each other to not only keep each other grounded, but to also reign in their annoying tendencies. The Farrellys seem more equipped to handle things on their own, but we just won’t see another Shallow Hal or Kingpin where those two styles blend together perfectly. There was a trend about a decade ago when these types of films were really common and big hits. Game Night, Horrible Bosses, and probably most notably Tag were movies where you had really good actors put into a completely outrageous premise, and the result was usually comedy gold because the actors actually take it seriously. This is another one in that tradition, but for some reason it didn’t really pick up any traction and wound up being a direct to Amazon Prime movie. I’m not necessarily complaining, it is hilarious and right there for everyone to watch for free, but it just gives more fuel to the groupthink critics who are still feeling raw about Green Book. Give this movie a chance, it is the funniest film I have seen in at least 6 months, and it is low-key the best movie released in 2024 so far. Grab a couple beers and check it out! It would have been a riot to see with a big audience, but it plays just fine at home.
3 stars
What are your thoughts on Ricky Stanicky? Do you like the direction Peter Farrelly is going in? Let me know in the comments!
No comments:
Post a Comment