Within the first 15 minutes, Adele Lim sets the tone of her directorial debut, Joy Ride. A young white couple (David Denman and Annie Mumolo) approaches a bewildered-looking Asian family on the playground. The couple awkwardly ask the parents (Kenneth Liu and Debbie Fan) if they're Chinese, to which the mom affirms their assumption, defensively adding that they're American and have moved to White Hills from California. After it's revealed that the white couple have an adopted daughter from China, their two young daughters go off to play as their parents look on in relief that they found each other. When a little white boy launches a racist insult their way, he's met with a "Fuck you!" and punch to the face.
Flash forward a decade-plus from that fateful meeting on the playground, and the adopted daughter, Audrey (Ashley Park), is a successful lawyer with partner on the horizon and Lolo (Sherry Cola), Audrey's automatic Asian friend and constant defender, is a "body-positive artist" living in Audrey's garage. When Audrey is tasked with going to Beijing to close out a deal that will rubber-stamp her promotion, she brings Lolo as a translator. Joining along on this trip is Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), Lolo's K-pop obsessed cousin, who Audrey reluctantly tolerates under the condition that Deadeye is simply tagging along on the plane ride to visit their own friends and family in China.
When they first arrive in Beijing, the group meets up with Kat (Stephanie Hsu), a famous Chinese soap opera actress and Audrey's college bestie. Through a very particular set of circumstances, which includes Audrey trusting a dodgey-looking white American over Chinese locals to her detriment, the four girls find themselves stranded in the Chinese countryside without their passports.
The road-trip-buddy-comedy film plays out in ways that are both expected and unexpected of the genre. There's montages of both the drug- and sex-fuelled kind, fun cameos, a friendship breakdown with the subsequent tearful reunion, and a revelatory plot twist that uniquely sends up Hollywood. Joy Ride finds a balance often missing in comedies where the comedown, however predictable, offers something beyond a permanent smile and sore stomach muscles.
Friendship solely based on ethnicity, white people fumbling around racial issues, and casual violence and vulgarity encompass Joy Ride — with some added R-rated raunch and inside jokes. Thanks to a clever script by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, Joy Ride finds a way into social commentary and observations while also engaging in devil's threesomes, plenty of vagina jokes, and amusingly specific insults about looking like Hello Kitty if she'd been skull-fucked by Keroppi.
It's an absolute joy seeing Park, Hsu, Cola and Wu engaging in roles that wouldn't have been available to them even five years earlier. In spite of how seemingly singular Joy Ride's offering is in a social context, what makes the comedy and the emotional beats work so well is how natural the leads play them. Park in particular exudes such a casual vibe that her buttoned-down character fits right in with the rather extraordinary crassness.
Joy Ride can be deceiving. On the face of it, the film is the raunchy, R-rated summer flick that No Hard Feelings attempted to be. However, once the obscenities are parsed through, Joy Ride is a thoughtful movie about a variety of racial issues through an Asian-American lens but relatable to many diasporas. Don't get me wrong — the comedy is extremely well-done and sharp, and I haven't laughed this hard at a movie all year. But the heart of this film comes from the friendship of the four leads and the journey of Audrey, specifically.
Joy Ride is unapologetically made by the Asian diaspora for the Asian diaspora. Nevertheless, it's bound to pick up passengers of all stripes along the way, largely because the film appeals to the immaturity and crudity that exists among all of us, no matter how Audrey-like we may appear to be.
(Cineplex Pictures)Flash forward a decade-plus from that fateful meeting on the playground, and the adopted daughter, Audrey (Ashley Park), is a successful lawyer with partner on the horizon and Lolo (Sherry Cola), Audrey's automatic Asian friend and constant defender, is a "body-positive artist" living in Audrey's garage. When Audrey is tasked with going to Beijing to close out a deal that will rubber-stamp her promotion, she brings Lolo as a translator. Joining along on this trip is Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), Lolo's K-pop obsessed cousin, who Audrey reluctantly tolerates under the condition that Deadeye is simply tagging along on the plane ride to visit their own friends and family in China.
When they first arrive in Beijing, the group meets up with Kat (Stephanie Hsu), a famous Chinese soap opera actress and Audrey's college bestie. Through a very particular set of circumstances, which includes Audrey trusting a dodgey-looking white American over Chinese locals to her detriment, the four girls find themselves stranded in the Chinese countryside without their passports.
The road-trip-buddy-comedy film plays out in ways that are both expected and unexpected of the genre. There's montages of both the drug- and sex-fuelled kind, fun cameos, a friendship breakdown with the subsequent tearful reunion, and a revelatory plot twist that uniquely sends up Hollywood. Joy Ride finds a balance often missing in comedies where the comedown, however predictable, offers something beyond a permanent smile and sore stomach muscles.
Friendship solely based on ethnicity, white people fumbling around racial issues, and casual violence and vulgarity encompass Joy Ride — with some added R-rated raunch and inside jokes. Thanks to a clever script by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, Joy Ride finds a way into social commentary and observations while also engaging in devil's threesomes, plenty of vagina jokes, and amusingly specific insults about looking like Hello Kitty if she'd been skull-fucked by Keroppi.
It's an absolute joy seeing Park, Hsu, Cola and Wu engaging in roles that wouldn't have been available to them even five years earlier. In spite of how seemingly singular Joy Ride's offering is in a social context, what makes the comedy and the emotional beats work so well is how natural the leads play them. Park in particular exudes such a casual vibe that her buttoned-down character fits right in with the rather extraordinary crassness.
Joy Ride can be deceiving. On the face of it, the film is the raunchy, R-rated summer flick that No Hard Feelings attempted to be. However, once the obscenities are parsed through, Joy Ride is a thoughtful movie about a variety of racial issues through an Asian-American lens but relatable to many diasporas. Don't get me wrong — the comedy is extremely well-done and sharp, and I haven't laughed this hard at a movie all year. But the heart of this film comes from the friendship of the four leads and the journey of Audrey, specifically.
Joy Ride is unapologetically made by the Asian diaspora for the Asian diaspora. Nevertheless, it's bound to pick up passengers of all stripes along the way, largely because the film appeals to the immaturity and crudity that exists among all of us, no matter how Audrey-like we may appear to be.