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