’Ricky Stanicky’ Review

John Cena’s star has steadily been on the rise over the last few years. He has been the rare
wrestler-turned-actor who has found success, with career making performances in The
Suicide Squad and Peacemaker. And just a few days ago he made headlines for bearing it all at the Academy Awards. In Amazon’s new comedy, Ricky Stanicky, he takes center stage as the title character, but his charisma isn’t enough to prop up this thin script.

Lifelong friends Dean, JT and Wes (Zac Efron, Andrew Santino and Jermaine Fowler) have
made a habit of using their fake friend Ricky to get themselves out of sticky situations and to
take impromptu holidays. When their lies begin to catch up with them, they cast raunchy
Atlantic City celebrity impersonator ‘Rock Hard’ Rod Rimestead (Cena) as their elusive friend. Hijinks ensue as Ricky begins to worm his way further into their lives than any of them anticipated, ensnaring himself in the group’s romantic and work relationships.

The script first made news in Hollywood when in 2010 it was announced that James Franco
was attached to play Stanicky. After he left the project, both Joaquin Phoenix and Jim Carrey
passed through the orbit of the film. Eventually, it landed at Amazon and John Cena and Zac Efron became attached. Unfortunately, after nearly fifteen years and eight writers there is somehow still nowhere near enough plot here to justify the near two hour runtime. The film feels as if its’ premise was fed to a chatbot to generate a handful of weak comedic set pieces. The film is low on genuine laughs, the few here coming from John Cena’s all-in performance.

Cena is genuinely the one bright spot, the star trying to squeeze every once of water from the
stone of this script. Zac Efron is fine as Dean, and he has a few moments of genuine emotion (though it mostly comes from a contrived revelation about his character.) But this is a far cry from the film he shot just before Stanicky, ‘The Iron Claw.’

John Cena was the face of the WWE for about a decade. In that time he learned how to carry a television show on his back, wringing entertainment out of one of the companies weakest time periods. In Ricky Stanicky he’s back to what he’s used to; carrying a project on his back, trying his hardest to wring out entertainment from a weak script. In both cases, he was still captivating to watch. In both cases, his star power was left untarnished. In both cases, he perhaps deserved better.