Prime Time: Ricky Stanicky (2024)

I saw the trailer for Ricky Stanicky a couple of months ago and I wasn’t happy. First of all, it looked dire. Second, I knew I would still eventually watch it. And so here we are, but was it as dire as the trailer made it out to be?

After a childhood incident that requires some quick creativity, three friends realise how much they can help themselves by making use of an imaginary friend, named Ricky Stanicky. Ricky can be blamed for many  misadventures, he can be used to get out of other obligations, and life is just better with him available. That is, of course, until things are complicated by people wanting to meet Ricky. With the alternative option (coming clean after many years) not really an option at all, our main characters hire an adult entertainer/actor (John Cena) they met in Atlantic City. 

Starring Zak Efron, Andrew Santino, and Jermaine Fowler as the friends who keep the secret of Ricky Stanicky between them, this is a fairly enjoyable and predictable comedy that would have really benefited from pushing into much more outrageous and bawdier territory (which people might have expected from director Peter Farrelly, although he has certainly settled in to helming much mellower fare over the past decade). I enjoyed the leads well enough, but there should have been someone else on the mix, someone to help add laughs and elevate every scene. Santino is clearly positioned here as the most comedic of the cast, setting aside Cena for the moment, but he just isn’t good enough.

I am surprised that this doesn’t feel like a bigger mess though, considering at least half a dozen writers were responsible for the screenplay. While it lacks any big laughs, and even skimps on the milder chuckles, it works well for most of the runtime due to the potential of the premise. There’s also a very enjoyable second act that shows “Ricky” stealing the show and living up to his legendary reputation.

Efron has always been someone I enjoy seeing onscreen, and he is fine here as the man who desperately hopes to get through a busy time without being caught out for his many lies. Santino is okay, but not as funny as he should be, and the same can be said of Fowler, who is given a plot strand that never feels fully developed, making you wonder why it was included anyway. Lex Scott Davis and Anja Savcic have a few good moments, playing the partners of Efron and Santino, respectively, and William H. Macy is fun as their boss (accompanied in one or two scenes by Jane Badler, playing his wife). Cena is the star though, given another chance to showcase his comedy chops, and he tries hard to make up for the weaknesses elsewhere in the script, whether oozing confidence and knowledge about subjects that Ricky should be fluent in or being shown performing his act onstage as “Rock-Hard Rod”. He’s certainly game to give anything a go, and I appreciate how well he transitioned from one incarnation of his personality to the next, sensing an opportunity to turn Ricky into his big break.

The enthusiasm and talent of Cena isn’t enough though. This isn’t a good movie, although it also isn’t the horrible car crash I thought it might be. It’s just average. I was moderately entertained while it was on, but I am never going to revisit it. At least it doesn’t end in a way that seems to set up any sequel opportunities. There should only ever be one Ricky Stanicky.

5/10

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Netflix And Chill: Me Time (2022)

A slick comedy star vehicle from John Hamburg, the director of Along Came Polly, I Love You, Man, Why Him?, and a few other projects (in film and TV), you will probably already know whether or not you want to watch Me Time when you see that it stars Mark Wahlberg and Kevin Hart. I wasn't exactly rushing to see it, but I am glad I did. It's silly, it's predictable, it allows Wahlberg and Hart to feel characters that are very much within the normal range of their performances, but it's also a decent bit of fun.

Hart plays Sonny Fisher, a loving and happy husband who loves organising everything for his kids (Dashiell, played by Che Tafari, and Ava, played by Amentii Sledge) while his successful wife (Maya, played by Regina Hall) keeps developing her career. It's time for Sonny to have some "me time" though, something his wife encourages when he is asked by his old friend, Huck (Wahlberg), to join him for a massive birthday celebration trip. I am sure you can pretty much write the rest of this. Sonny joins Huck, things get messy, and there are also some attempts by Huck and Sonny to recapture glorious moments from their youth.

I'm not sure if writer-director Hamburg actually put any thought into this, or whether he instead just fed some details into a program that auto-generates modern mainstream comedies. It feels like the latter, with the amusing set-pieces, the occasional gross (but very tame) moment, and a finale that feels rushed and unearned, but maybe that makes me an even bigger sucker for laughing as often as I did. I didn't laugh all the way through it, and I often rolled my eyes at the same time as I laughed, but the film basically worked on me in the way it was intended to.

Hart does what he usually does. He gets stressed out by things and rages ineffectively against them. Wahlberg is the one able to push him into action, and he does that by playing the standard Wahlberg character, one lacking any self-awareness or worries about the possibility of anything going wrong. Tafari and Sledge are both very good in their smaller roles, and I always like to see Hall onscreen, even if she's relegated to really just being "the wife" for this film. Andrew Santino is a lot of fun, playing another family man who goes from zero to one hundred as soon as he decides to join in with the partying, and Ilia Isorelýs Paulino steals a couple of scenes as a driver who ends up involved in a very fun set-piece about halfway through the movie. Jimmy O. Yang and Shira Gross are also fairly amusing, and there's a fun celebrity cameo to enjoy, as well as very small roles for John Amos, Anna Maria Horsford, Diane Delano, and one or two others.

Although advertised as a film about someone finally getting to have some fun again, with the risks that can entail (depending on what the fun involves), it's actually your standard tale of someone misunderstanding a situation so badly that it jeopardises their relationship with loved ones, which leads to a bad situation that needs fully remedied before the end credits roll. While the stars are just lazily repeating themselves, there's still fun to be had with their interplay, the supporting cast, and the strangely comforting factor of it all being so obviously designed to "preach to the choir". I doubt I'll ever rewatch it, but I wasn't in pain while it was on (and at 101-minutes, it also gets a bonus point for not feeling unnecessarily bloated).

6/10

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