Streaming mediocrity: ‘Ricky Stanicky,’ ‘Damsel,’ ‘Spaceman’
Streaming services are capable of making good movies that don’t play in movie theaters, as proven every fall when Netflix unleashes a solid handful of titles intended to garner Oscar nominations.
Unfortunately, the streaming services mostly dump mediocre products during the rest of the year, seemingly only so they can advertise the presence of new content. Cases in point: Amazon’s “Ricky Stanicky” and Netflix’s “Damsel” and “Spaceman.”
The inert comedy “Ricky Stanicky” hails from Peter Farrelly, one half of the “Farrelly Brothers” comedy pipeline that made “There’s Something About Mary,” “Dumb and Dumber” and several other movies significantly less funny than those two. Peter then moved on to direct and co-write “Green Book,” a decent drama that had absolutely no business winning the Best Picture Oscar for 2018.
“Stanicky” is an R-rated return to “Mary”-type crass humor, though without charm, laughs or memorable characters. It stars Zack Efron, Jermaine Fowler and Andrew Santino as friends who, for years, have used a distant, totally-made-up friend named Ricky Stanicky to get out of various social obligations. For example, one bro worms out of a baby shower (for his own kid!) by giving fake-Ricky a new cancer scare.
Good guys, huh?
While partying, the boys accidentally miss the actual birth of the kid, forcing the crew into expanding their lie. The solution: Hire a lowly, alcoholic actor (played by John Cena) to portray their old friend for an in-person event. Hijinks ensue!
“Stanicky” becomes tolerable whenever Cena appears onscreen as the devoted-but-overzealous actor. While his post-wrestling career has included some action-oriented misfires, Cena has thrived in supporting comedic roles, most especially in “Blockers,” and James Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad” (which then filtered into Cena’s best work in the HBO spinoff “Peacemaker.”)
Unfortunately, Cena’s commitment isn’t enough to salvage this shaggy, mostly humorless affair about a trio of bad people who don’t deserve the sympathy “Ricky Stanicky” provides them.
Meanwhile, over on Netflix, a couple of notable, capable stars headline two uninspiring genre efforts. First, “Stranger Things” breakout Millie Bobby Brown headlines “Damsel,” a medieval fantasy about a young woman named Elodie who reluctantly agrees to marry a prince to help her impoverished family. The marriage is a sham, and once Elodie says “I do,” the stone-hearted queen (Robin Wright) dumps her into a pit as part of a centuries-old sacrificial ritual designed to appease a vicious, fire-breathing dragon. Most of the movie focuses on Elodie trying to evade the chatty beast (voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo).
Though the premise establishes a golden opportunity for Brown to elevate her action star status, the movie’s repetitive cat-and-mouse game lacks excitement. The overqualified supporting cast, which includes Angela Bassett and Ray Winstone, have little to do, and the movie turns every opportunity for fun (like, say, finding an inventive way for Elodie to turn the dragon against her captors) into dour, listless action that’s too reliant on shoddy CGI effects.
Elsewhere on the streamer, the Adam Sandler-led drama “Spaceman” at least manages to convincingly place the Sandman in zero gravity on a solo mission lying beyond Jupiter. Lonely and on the outs with his wife on Earth (Carey Mulligan, totally underutilized), Sandler’s astronaut is visited by a peaceful, talkative alien arachnid (soothingly voiced by Paul Dano). The space spider uses its telepathic abilities to pierce the Sandman’s loneliness to investigate why he literally left the planet to avoid his pregnant wife.
“Spaceman,” written by Colby Day, based on a book by Jaroslav Kalfar and directed by Johan Renck, attempts to merge sci-fi with artistically rendered flashbacks of Sandler and Mulligan back on Earth. Wanting to resonate with “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”-level memory sequences, the film cuts around the couple’s central conflict and fails to provide necessary character depth of its leads. The movie withholds the interiority of the characters, making their conflict too abstract to connect.
Sandler continues to be an underrated dramatic actor, and the film executes a few strong moments between the astronaut and the alien, but those successes only emphasize the rest of the film’s shortcomings. While “Spaceman” is the most creatively successful of these three streaming titles, very little of it will linger in the mind after Netflix auto-plays “What to watch next.”
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Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.
This image released by Amazon Prime shows, from left, Jermaine Fowler, Zac Efron and Andrew Santino in a scene from "Ricky Stanicky."