Global Courant
Raunch-coms live or die by their ability to make you go “Oh my god!” or “Ewwwww!” or do a spit-take that spews popcorn over whoever is unlucky enough to be sitting in front of you. So you can give it up for Joy Ride, director Adele Lim’s variation on the road-trip-gone-awry story that doesn’t skimp on the holy-shit moments, or gags that actually make you gag a little bit. We don’t want to spoil anything for viewers, so let’s say that there could be bags of coke that explode inside bodily orifices, at which point much horniness may ensue. You might get a close-up of a very extreme tattoo, inked in an extremely painful place to have one. Perhaps there will be a tribute to the joys of a vigorous “Devil’s Triangle” (also known as “the Eiffel Tower”). Let’s just say that the film’s R rating isn’t the only thing that’s hard here.
Sex, drugs, profanity, penises, puke, poop, the use of “party” as a blind — Joy Ride embraces these reliable gross-out-comedy standbys with a gleeful sense of gusto. It’s also out to prove that you can make something novel without reducing it to being a novelty. The fact that the quartet tearing their way through Beijing and the rural provinces of China are Asian-American is a key factor, and Lim, her co-writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, and the cast all lean into the cross-cultural currencies, specifics and yes, slings and arrows of prejudice that are part of their experiences. It’s not the only factor, however, and the movie is less interested in breaking new ground than leaving its footprints on a well-trodden road. Representation still matters to the makers of Joy Ride. But so does staging a highly gymnastic threesome for maximum belly laughs.
Any archetypes you see here will be the recognizable ones from a million other raunch-coms. Audrey (Ashley Park) is an overachieving lawyer who’s on the verge of becoming a partner in a film, if she can close a major deal in China. She’s bringing her best friend Lolo (Sherry Cola, who’s also in the upcoming Randall Park movie Shortcomings), an anarchic artist, as well as a translator; the two have been like sisters since Lolo told a pint-sized bigot to fuck off and punched him in the face on the playground. Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), Lolo’s socially awkward K-pop–obsessed cousin, has invited themselves along for the trip as well. Once there, the trio hooks up with Kat (Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Stephanie Hsu), Audrey’s old college roommate and the star of a popular Chinese period drama called The Emperor’s Daughter.
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After a night of heavy drinking with the firm’s prospective new client (Ronny Chieng), it’s just a matter of getting his signature on the dotted line. Only there’s a catch, see: He wants to meet her mother, “because how can you do business with someone when you don’t know their family?” Audrey was adopted by white parents as a baby, something she’s reluctant to publicize. Luckily, Lolo has the number of the Chinese adoption agency and had been pestering her friend about looking up her birth mother while they were in the country. They just have to find her, reunite Audrey with the woman who gave her up, heal years worth of emotional scars, and bring her back to Beijing in four days. What could go wrong?
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Virtually everything — surprise! — and Joy Ride takes great pleasure in putting its core four through the ringer, when the group itself isn’t leaving destruction, debauchery, and physically injured basketball stars in their wake. The co-writer of Crazy Rich Asians, Lim has said she wanted to make something that was both an old-school comedy she’d wished she had in her twenties and represented her rapport with close friends now (“we hang out all the time and it’s just dick jokes”). It helps that she’s assembled a mostly female ensemble — Wu is nonbinary — that genuinely click, and complement each other’s comic strengths. There’s a spark to how Park’s high-strung Type A personality clashes up against Cola’s chaos energy; how the mutual bestie-envy between Cola and Hsu’s characters creates beaucoup frenemy chemistry; and how Wu’s constant switching between murmuring, monotonous weirdness and inappropriate outbursts lets them play the wild card against everyone.
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The salaciousness of what happens to these messy, flawed, horny, hungover, all-too human twentysomethings plays better than the sentimentality that takes over that last third or so, which quickly goes from sweet to saccharine on its way to the inevitable equivalent of a group hug. The need for likability becomes a liability in the end. Still, Joy Ride understands how to get down and dirty, and that the healing power of raunch-coms lies in making the transgressive seem relatable, and vice versa. (Who among us has not miscounted the amount of cocaine bags we’ve shoved up our ass at one time or another?) The fact that this genre was a sandbox that once seemed off limits to the talented people now playing in it adds an extra thrill as well. If it’s the start of a beautiful, ongoing working relationship between Lim and these four, we’ll take it. Let a thousand foul-mouthed, massage-gun-abusing, middle-finger-flying flowers bloom.
