John Cena gives another great comedic performance in a film that falters around him.

It’s easy to see how Ricky Stanicky’s basic concept – a trio of friends hire an actor to pretend to be the made-up pal they’ve used as an all-purpose excuse to get out of trouble for years – could make for a great comedy. And given the comedic chops previously demonstrated by Zac Efron and John Cena, casting the former as the center of the friend group and the latter as the actor hired to pose as the title character also makes a ton of sense. Unfortunately, the result is a movie whose handful of solid laughs aren’t enough to justify the remainder of its running time.

As explained in flashback (with an accompanying “kids get splattered in dog crap” bit that suggests a level of gross-out the rest of the movie doesn’t match), Ricky Stanicky is the imaginary friend Dean (Efron), Wes (Jermaine Fowler), and JT (Andrew Santino) dreamed up as kids – the invented scapegoat for their collective wrongdoings and absences. Obviously, the Ricky con hasn’t been subjected to any clos