Comedy veteran Peter Farrelly shows very little experience with this puerile caper on Amazon about three friends concocting a wacky scheme

Imagine your husband, or your friend’s husband, or even your friend, has a pal you’ve never met named Ricky Stanicky. This invisible Stanicky character never visits, barely calls and seems to have about one crisis a year – testicular cancer, or a surprise return from charity work in Kenya, or rehab. This would probably be dubious at best, and baseline annoying. Then suppose this Stanicky calls with a medical crisis in the middle of a baby shower, taking two of the hosts away and causing one to miss the birth of his child. That would definitely be annoying.

Such is the baseline feeling of watching Ricky Stanicky, a new Amazon buddy comedy directed by genre veteran Peter Farrelly, which doesn’t have enough heart to overpower its puerile humor or its characters’ generally objectionable schemes. For Ricky Stanicky, the person, is a made-up character on which three childhood friends, Dean (Zac Efron), JT (Andrew Santino) and Wes (Jermaine Fowler), have blamed two decades’ worth of misbehavior, starting with accidentally burning someone’s house down in a Halloween prank gone awry.