Movie Review: Joy Ride (R – 95 minutes)

 

I enjoy a fun raunchy comedy and Joy Ride delivers on that promise.

Audrey and Lolo have been friends since they were little, being the only two Asian girls in their area/school.  Audrey was adopted, and Lolo was there with her parents. As they get older, Audrey becomes the responsible adult while Lolo becomes the freewheeling artist.  When Audrey gets the opportunity to go to China to close a big deal for work, meeting up with her college friend, Lolo goes along as translator, and brings her cousin, Deadeye.  Hijinks ensue.

Apart from the usual drama of your childhood best friend encountering your college best friend and the jealousy/bonding that can happen there, the girls encounter a drug dealer, a basketball team, impersonate a k-pop group, and then decide to find Audrey’s birth mom, which does not go as planned. 

Directed by Adele Lim, this movie is fun and touching, and manages to walk the line between standard girls trip style comedy while adding in the layers of what it means to be a woman of color, in this case Asian-American, the feeling of belonging and not belonging as the characters discuss being too Asian but also not Asian enough.  I appreciated that the movie brings that in and layers it over the comedy.  No race is a monolith and exploring stereotypes and expectations can really bring dimension to comedies as well as dramas, so it is nice to see that here. The cast is great and the comic set pieces are ridiculously fun. I particularly enjoy how the four ladies manage to destroy an entire basketball team.

The cast is wonderful and the four leads play off each other very well. Ashley Park is absolutely the stand-out from Emily in Paris on Netflix, and it was wonderful to get to see her lead this movie. Sherry Cola brings an ease to Lolo and Stephanie Hsu proved how wonderful she can be in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, so it is no surprise she’s fantastic here playing the two sides of Kat – the publicly buttoned up persona and the wild friend.  Stand up comedian Sabrina Wu brings the oddball nature of Deadeye into the combination, providing both outlandish bits and some hard-hitting honest moments. 

Everyone else is basically cameos around the quad, which is as it should be in a movie like this.  Desmond Chiam as Clarence, Kat’s fiancée is charming. Ronny Chieng continues to reliably play the same character everywhere – hey, he’s great at it – let him keep going!  Baron Davis as Baron Davis was the surprise for me, he was genuinely funny!  Also – any movie that adds Daniel Dae Kim is hitting the right notes. 

Overall, the movie is fun and sweet, certainly worth streaming, maybe not necessary to see in the theater, but definitely worth a watch - if only for the cautionary tale of where not to get a tattoo!

6 out of 10

Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (PG13 – 154 minutes)

 

In my opinion, Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the best movies ever made.  Temple of Doom is fine and I really enjoy Last Crusade.  I do not think we need to mention the other one.  I was a bit nervous about this, no one really was asking for more Indiana Jones movies, but here we are, and I went in cautiously optimistic.

I was pleased with Dial of Destiny. It maintains the sense of fun and adventure and definitely functions as a decent send off for Indy.  The movie begins with a flashback to the end of WWII as Indy is rescuing his friend from a train full of Nazis.  The Spear of Longinus makes a brief cameo as a red herring of the Macguffin of this movie.  Side note – the Spear of Longinus always makes me think of the 1997 TV show Roar. If you are not familiar with Roar, go ahead and look that up - you’re welcome!

As Indy goes through train car after train car full of Nazis, he eventually rescues his pal Basil from the evil Dr. Voller’s clutches while Basil collects half of the Dial of Destiny – apparently created by Archimedes to predict time-space anomalies. They escape from the train and we reencounter Indy years later living alone in an apartment yelling at his loud neighbors as the city is about to celebrate the return of the moon landing astronauts in 1969.  Marion has left him after their son Mutt died in Vietnam and he is retiring from his teaching job at the university.  Basil’s daughter, Helena (Indy’s goddaughter) shows up to steal the half of the Dial of Destiny – to sell it.  This launches the adventure as Dr. Voller and his henchmen show up to collect the other half of the Dial, leading to a global chase and some fun archaeology as they try to chase down what the dial does and prevent the bad guys from getting there first.

Directed by James Mangold, I found this to be charming and entertaining. It feels in line with the Indy we have come to know. The action sequences are great – the entire train chase bit at the beginning is fantastic, and I enjoyed the little tuk tuk race in the middle. I didn’t mind the digital de-aging in the cold open – I feel like it looked pretty good.  I also didn’t mind the end, which I have heard some people grumble about. For a character that has dealt with ghost in an ark, heart-ripping in a cult, and a ghost protecting a cup – the end of this movie made sense to me.  I feel like it understood the tone and everyone in it was on board and committed to having fun while delivering on what was asked.

Harrison Ford loves playing Indiana Jones and it does show, I appreciated his grumpiness in the beginning but his gradual loosening as he allowed himself to have fun when he got back to adventuring.  Phoebe Waller-Bridge was a good counter-part as Helena and certainly could keep going with these if she chose.  I did not understand why there was a kid sidekick and felt like that could have been removed. 

It was a thrill to see John Rhys-Davies back as Sallah, and I could have used a little more of him and his whole mess of kids helping Indy out of jams.  Mads Mikkelsen is a flawless villain and was coolly nasty as someone who was determined to solve the issues of the third Reich in order to make it ‘better’.  Boyd Holbrook shows up as his number one henchman in a weird including-the-CIA-in-the-story-for-no-good-reason bit.

I was slightly mystified by the inclusion of Antonio Banderas for approximately one and a half scenes.  If you have someone that charismatic, why not give him actual stuff to do?  Maybe he was busy.

Overall, the movie was fun and entertaining. Not flawless, but I absolutely enjoyed it. It’s a little too long, and certainly some bits could have been cut out, but I do love to see Indy figuring out puzzles as he digs through a tomb and/or cave. 

7 out of 10

Movie Review: Fast X (PG13 – 141 minutes)

 

Way back in 2001, if you had told me when I came out of the theater after watching The Fast and The Furious that I would be watching the tenth installment in that franchise in 2023 – and absolutely looking forward to the eleventh, I am not sure I would have believed you – and I loved that first one.  After all, that movie involved a cop going undercover with a street racing gang to bust them for stealing DVD/VCR combos.  To date, the Fast & Furious franchise has spawned ten films, with two more on the way, one spin-off, amusement park rides, games, and could honestly go on and on. There is not really a secret to the franchise’s success, it is pretty straight forward globe-trotting action set pieces with a central theme of family, both chosen and blood - who can argue with that?

In this episode of the Fast saga, we catch up to the Torettos as they are enjoying barbeque, family & Coronas at the house in L.A., continuing their trend of letting the antagonist from the previous film be a good guy in the next one.  Suddenly, their old nemesis Cypher shows up to let them know that a new threat has arisen.  If you remember way back in Fast Five, Brian and Dom drove a drug dealer’s safe through much of Rio de Janeiro, causing huge amounts of damage in a chase that ended with the drug dealer losing his life.  The son of that dealer, Dante, is now coming for the Toretto crew and he is particularly vicious and crazy.  Along the way, Dom and the others have to pick up materials, allies, a couple enemies, all while stopping this new threat and trying to keep their family safe. 

I loved this movie – it is completely over the top bonkers nonsense and knows it.  And yet, this one is a little more grounded than the last one.  This one is directed by Louis Leterrier, a French action director out of the Luc Besson stable. He has done some things I really loved (The Transporter, Unleashed, the Incredible Hulk), some things that were okay (Now You See Me), and some things I have not liked (the Clash of the Titans remake).  In Fast X, he takes the franchise back to mainly car chases and action sequences – and yes, those have been key to all of the movies, but admittedly, in the last one, they drove a car in space. 

The action here is great, the bomb vs. car sequence in Rome in the beginning is ridiculous and entertaining. The helicopter vs. car sequence near the end is fun and the hand to hand combat between Charlieze Theron and Michelle Rodriguez is particularly fantastic.  

There's so much in terms of cast, it's tough to talk about all of them, but the family core group all continue to be wonderful, even if by now we have so many lead characters not everyone is getting enough screen time.  Thank goodness Han is back for real, I love that Mia gets one badass action sequence per movie, but it's too bad she then has to pretend to go back to Brian and their kids.  Tej and Roman continue to get on each others' nerves, Ramsey still has nearly nothing to do.  While John Cena’s Jakob Toretto was an interesting foil last film, he felt stiff and forced. Here he is wonderful. He seems to have been let off the leash and completely understands the movie he is in.  

Honestly, most of the cast has a good time and plays these flicks with a wink&nod. It’s just Vin Diesel that takes them a little too seriously – but you need that at the center of the movie so that everyone else can be crazy. Also - we have the fantastic addition of Rita Moreno as Grandma Toretto (I sort of hope we get to see an action sequence with her and Helen Mirren's Queenie in the next movie).  

The addition of Brie Larson as a new Nobody – the daughter of Kurt Russel’s character from a few movies ago – helps keep the Torettos involved with The Agency (who knows who or what they are, or what goals they have).  And we get to add in the wonderful Alan Ritchson as a new Agency heavy hand, making this the first movie I can think of with two Aquamen in it.

And speaking of crazy – what a glorious addition Jason Momoa is.  It is as if he was given the sole direction of ‘have fun and bring complete chaos’ and my goodness – he is extra in every way. It lightens up the movie while bringing a definite threat.  That dude is living his absolute best life.

Overall, I really loved this one, maybe more than the last couple and I really liked the last one.  If I had to rank them, it would look like this:  1, 5, 10, 9, 6, 4, 7, 8, 2, 3.  Hobbs & Shaw being a spin off is not in that count and honestly, that ranking is basically arbitrary anyway. They’re all silly and wonderful!  Grab your family, popcorn, and a Corona and check it out.

9 out of 10 – but really, shouldn’t it be 10 out of 12 since two more of these are guaranteed on their way?