From left, Sabrina Wu, Ashley Park, Sherry Cola and Stephanie Hsu star in “Joy Ride.” Photo courtesy of Lionsgate
LOS ANGELES, July 3 (UPI) — Joy Ride, in theaters Friday, is a raunchy comedy where the jokes are hit and miss. But there are enough hits over the course of 95 minutes to make viewing it worthwhile.
Audrey (Ashley Park) and Lolo (Sherry Cola) grew up as best friends in fictional White Hills, Wash. When Audrey travels to Beijing to close a business deal for her law firm, she brings Lolo along.
Lolo also invites her cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) and the trio meet up with Kat (Stephanie Hsu), who is an actor on Chinese television.
Audrey’s client dismisses Audrey for being so Americanized. Audrey was adopted by a White family.
So, to land the deal, Audrey promises she’s close with her Chinese birth mother and offers to bring her to her next meeting with the client. Lolo already set things in motion with Audrey’s adoption agency hoping to encourage Audrey to find her birth mother anyway.
Many outrageous comedies have been predicated on a generic business deal. In Joy Ride too, it is enough to set the quartet off on the real story, which is exploring the country and resolving familial issues.
A mishap on the train costs the girls their passports, but the trip doesn’t turn into a disaster like Plains, Trains and Automobiles or Road Trip. It just forces them to explore more of the country, from cities to rural areas, and encounter different people.
The cast has chemistry and a dynamic of old friends with familiarity and rivalries. As such, they banter a lot, with some riffs generating more humor than others.
All of the women are sex positive. Lolo is the most overt as an artist making sexually explicit sculptures, but all four treat sex as a good thing that should be celebrated.
This leads to a montage of sexual escapades that are hilarious in their creative configurations. There are some big jokes that the trailers fortunately did not spoil yet, including a graphic full frontal gag.
The emotion still hits amid those vulgar set pieces. Joy Ride is dealing with discovering the mother who gave up Audrey, as well as rifts in the female friendships.
Audrey struggles with her Asian identity throughout the movie. Even Audrey mixes up Korean and Chinese, and she’s so acclimated to the United States that she neglects her Asian side.
Those distinct cultural identities make Joy Ride stand out in a sea of White-led comedies. Sharing those cultural issues and making them equally funny and heartfelt shows they can be just as meaningful to diverse audiences.
But Joy Ride is a comedy first and foremost. The film rarely rests, so even if not every scene is hilarious, it’s never boring.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.