Any movie that features a group of friends butt-chugging and hoarding cocaine between various parts of their body should be considered with the utmost highest regard. Joy Ride features such a scene. Because of that alone, the sex comedy should be the romp of the summer. The movie nearly achieves that, but it falls short of total amusement.
Still, coming in at just over 90 minutes, Joy Ride, a fast-paced, whip-smart R-rated comedy, is worth a boisterous theatrical viewing. Adele Lim’s flick fits in with the likes of Bridesmaids and Girls Trip—which is to say, underneath all the big schlongs and frequent tonguing, there’s actual emotional depth. After the characters do 80 lines of coke or show off their “pussy tats,” they also muse about their identity, question their choices as young Asian women, and analyze their friendships with each other. That might sound like a wonky tonal balance. And yet, Joy Ride manages to feel breezy, while still touching on the sentimental parts of friendship.
Though most of the movie follows a group of four late-twentysomethings on their “first annual friends trip,” the main conflict is between Audrey (Ashley Park) and Lolo (Sherry Cola). The pair have been best friends since their parents forced them to play together in kindergarten. Audrey was adopted from China by white parents as a baby, and she has constantly struggled with her identity while living in Seattle: She can’t eat more than just a dash of spicy chili oil, but at the same time, her peers have always profiled her as the smart Asian girl. Spunky, headstrong Lolo, who has always been confident in her Chinese identity, is the perfect foil to Audrey’s coil of nerves.
Audrey and Lolo grow incredibly close—like, “sleepovers on school nights,” “celebrating holidays together with family,” and “know everything about each other”-level close. They’re inseparable—that is, until Audrey (voted “Most Likely to Be Successful” in high school) goes away to college and meets new besties, like acting superstar Kat (Everything Everywhere All At Once nominee Stephanie Hsu). Lolo (voted “Least Likely to Be Successful”) is left in the dust for a bit of time. But Audrey moves back to work as an associate at a law firm in Seattle, and the pair share a house together. Well, kind of: Audrey lives in the main house, while Lolo works on her sexual art projects in the shed. Nothing will separate them ever again!
But then, a trip to Beijing threatens to throw their entire friendship into question. Audrey is keeping a secret from Lolo that might affect the big vacay—er, “work trip,” per Audrey. Audrey’s law practice is willing to promote her to partner and send her off to Los Angeles—if she can secure a deal (it’s never clear what said “deal” is) in China. Suspecting that none of the Chinese businessmen speaks any English, Audrey has only opted to bring Lolo along so that she can serve as the trip’s translator. If Lolo is successful in helping Audrey get the deal, her best friend will thank her by moving away to another state. But Lolo is too excited about this being the pair’s very first vacation to be able to focus on the “work trip,” a label upon which Audrey insists.
This is enough plot to keep Joy Ride afloat and get the laughs rolling, but after the gang land in Beijing—with another pal, Lolo’s screwy BTS-obsessed cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) tagging along—there’s even more mess stirred into the pot. Kat will be joining the trio, agitating Lolo, because, goddammit, Lolo needs to be Audrey’s No. 1 bestie. The tension between the two, executed perfectly by Cola and Hsu—whose characters can’t accept that they have the same personality—is both impeccable and relatable. (Haven’t we all had that friend-of-a-friend who just tries way too hard to be the BFF? And haven’t we come to realize we’ve been trying too hard, just like them?)
But the plot gets a little convoluted when Audrey’s career storyline twists into a new shape. Now, in order to convince businessman Chao (Ronny Chieng)—who does speak English, actually, eliminating the need for Lolo to translate—to sign the deal with her firm, Audrey has to introduce at least one of her family members to Chao’s fam at a party they’re throwing later in the week. “A phoenix births a phoenix,” he says, by way of explanation. Audrey stutters, unsure of whether or not she should talk about her white parents in America. The trip hasn't been going too well so far as it is. She’s already made a fool out of herself, vomiting up shots that her other Chinese friends downed without batting an eye. Lolo steps in to save the day, promising Chao that he’ll meet Audrey’s birth mother by the end of the week.
Thus, the friends reroute the trip to a small town outside of Beijing. Lolo believes that, because Audrey was adopted out of that area, her birth mom must live somewhere around there. But after hopping aboard a train car with a drug smuggler (the always fantastic Meredith Hagner), the quartet is nearly arrested. Luckily, they aren’t deemed international criminals—they only lose their passports, then shove a bunch of cocaine and ecstasy down their throats and into their bras. (They would’ve maybe gotten off scot-free, if not for the smuggler blowing white powder all over them before the police arrived.)
Scenes like this—and, later, a raunchy sequence in which three out of the four pals have crazy sexcapades—lead to some laughs, but they slightly miss the mark of peak hilarity. The reveal of a devil tattoo on a private part is funny, but the joke stops there. Joy Ride is never entirely unfunny, but at times, the humor isn’t as wild and risqué as it could be. Simply tossing cocaine into the mix or pushing characters into threesomes isn’t enough to carry a comedy like this along. But the four leads have marvelous chemistry, which means that the tender points in the film make it worth watching, even if the humor doesn’t always land.
Joy Ride also sparked a bit of online discourse earlier this week after one white male critic slammed the film, claiming that it “objectifies men” and “targets white people.” Yes, it does both—and thank goodness! In fact, those moments, like when Audrey’s friends shame her for never having dated an Asian man, or when Audrey salivates over two Asian men, the first she’ll ever sleep with, or any of the jokes about Audrey acting like her white parents are some of the film’s finest points. Raunchy comedies have historically objectified women, and they are usually all about white people. Take a look at No Hard Feelings, another sex comedy in theaters right now, which has almost a completely white cast and turns its leading woman into a sexual prize for a young man. (It’s more sex positive than that and certainly not objectifying women, but Jennifer Lawrence is hired to be a hot lady and date a couple’s teenage son.) In fact, comedy as a genre has quite the loaded, racist history of targeting Asians and Asian Americans. It’s time that hilarious actors like Cola, Park, Hsu, and Wu rewrite the script.
While the humor may not quite live up to its R-rated buddy-comedy peers, the friendship sure does. Joy Ride is at its best when its leads unpack their identities, both as friends and as young, horny Asian women. The plot goes many a wrong way, with conflicts stacking up like those thousand-year-old egg shots the quartet downs at the club. But at a certain point, they begin to feel irrelevant. What matters is these friends have one another, they’re figuring out their lives (sometimes humorously, sometimes a little less comically), and we get to tag along for the Joy Ride.
