Peter Farrelly returns to his comedy roots with this Amazon original that is sure to leave you feeling like this was, in fact, a movie that you just watched. There will be no doubt, you just sat through a film, and not anything else. A funny film though? Well, comedy is often subjective. Lots of people are really into Tom Green. I’m not. But, for those people, they think he’s funny. Someone out there will find this hilarious.
The plot centers around a group of kids who get into trouble, and make up a fake friend who is to blame for the incident. Since the adults in their lives are functionally stupid, this plan works, and as they get older, they keep using him as an excuse for so many things, they keep a bible to remember it all. But, when (finally) someone calls them on their bullshit, the grown men hire an actor (John cena) to play Ricky. And that, is the reason this film works at all.
This film is a hot mess. I don’t care about the three guys, their lives, their families, even big names like Zac Efron and William H Macy, but I do think Cena is exceptional. His commitment to the humor of this film is why it works. It’s like watching Arnold Schwarzenegger in one of his good comedies, when he understands what makes the film work, like Twins or Kindergarten Cop.Cena is fully committed to this role, and he’s a blast to watch. It’s my favorite performance from him in quite sometime if I’m being honest. If anything works in this film at all, it is because he commits to the joke 110%. It pays off, because he makes the film watchable.
The three friends are garbage characters with little to no character development, who have family members who are supposedly normal, but also think their loved ones behavior is normal. If Cena wasn’t in this, I’d easily drop this a full letter grade. It also has awful audio description.Some group called Access Media made the audio description, which allows the random songs selected to fill out the soundtrack trample the audio description. So, the audio description might be going OK, but we must listen to this 80’s rock power ballad that has no real purpose, instead of the accessibility that wearily mumbles beneath it. No mixing here. They just spent a lot of time writing an audio description script they apparently didn’t want anyone to hear. No one is credited either, just Access Media, which has a website laden with positive reviews about how this company has made accessibility easy for these other companies. Great. Go describe PowerPoints. Get out of the film game, or hire someone to do sound mixing.
I think even though the film isn’t good, I still would like John Cena fans to see this. It’s seriously worth it. I’m not mad that I sat through a mediocre comedy with disappointing audio description simply because Cena made it worth my time.
Final Grade: C+
