Is Cringe Comedy back, baby? Master of the genre Peter Farrelly, who alongside brother Bobby directed such comedy classics as Kingpin, There’s Something About Mary, Me, Myself and I, and Dumb and Dumber, seems to be returning to form and he’s bringing John Cena and Zac Efron along for the ride.
According to Deadline, Farrelly is in talks with Efron and Cena to star in his upcoming comedy, Ricky Stanicky. The comedy would be the director’s first R-rated comedy since 2011. If the talks go through, Cena would play the title role of Ricky, a character made up by a group of husbands to blame for their own wayward behavior when begging their wives for forgiveness. Things go awry, though, when the wives want to meet Ricky. According to Deadline,
“What happens is the wives finally say, ‘Hey, wait a second — how come we never met Stanicky? He wasn’t at our wedding.’ Well, he was building houses in Africa. Well, he wasn’t at this or that. Bring him here, or don’t come home. So they hire a guy to come in for a day. They create a bible for the guy, and they pay him a thousand bucks to come and be Ricky Stanicky. He pulls it off with flying colors to the point where everybody loves him. And then the guys can’t get rid of him. Cena is Ricky Stanicky, and if you’ve seen him in Peacemaker, you see what he can do in a comedy. He’s hysterical in a show that really pushes it. I never knew much about John Cena until I saw that, and I was like, ‘There’s Stanicky right there.’”
— Peter Farrelly
The casting may also reunite Farrelly and Efron, who worked together in The Greatest Beer Run Ever, set to premiere at next week’s Toronto International Film Festival. Both Efron and Cena belong to that niche market of actors who look like they should be dominating the action movie field but have instead successfully negotiated careers as film comedians (while acknowledging that some of Cena’s funniest work is as the DCEU’s Peacemaker).
Farrelly’s career has followed the opposite path over the last few years, with turns into serious dramatic territory such as 2018’s Best Picture winner Green Book. Ricky Stanicky, which Farrelly has been working on as a concept for five years now, will be a huge return to form, and, if successful, a welcome callback to his comedy heyday for his fans.