In recent years, filmmaker Peter Farrelly has been moving into more respectable territory – 2018’s Green Book bagged Best Picture at the Oscars, and he followed it up with 2022’s still relatively-wholesome war film The Greatest Beer Run Ever. But this is the also one of the brothers behind Dumb And Dumber and There’s Something About Mary and Stuck On You – one of the granddaddies of grossout comedy. And with Ricky Stanicky, he’s veering back into bawdier territory. This one sees Zac Efron (who starred in Beer Run) and Jermaine Fowler and Andrew Santino play a trio of pals who have long made excuses by blaming things on made-up friend ‘Ricky Stanicky’. But when their lie threatens to be exposed, they hire John Cena to pretend to be the man himself. Watch the trailer here:
It’s a while since a Farrelly movie looked like this – and also a return to rowdy comedy fare for Efron, most recently seen tearing up the screen in The Iron Claw. Cena, too, is well known for going all-in on his R-rated comedy roles, often to great effect – hopefully there’s some magic in this team-up. Ricky Stanicky’s arrival comes many, many years in the making – the project dates back to at least 2010, when the script appeared on The Black List. Since then, it’s gone through various possible iterations before landing with Farrelly. The reason for all those near-misses on the production side? We blame a certain guy called Ricky Stanicky.
Will the project be worth the wait? Does Farrelly still have good grossout to give? Will it somehow break into awards season chatter, like Green Book? (OK, probably not.) We’ll find out when it streams on Prime Video from 7 March.