Bawdy and shamelessly silly at times, but also surprisingly heartfelt, Joy Ride takes the traditional male-centric R-rated comedy and filters it through the Asian-American, feminine perspective. If that sounds academic, don’t worry, this road movie rivals Freddy Got Fingered for crudeness.
Films like Bridesmaids set the standard for this kind of material, in which a group of women face their repressed fears by falling on their faces, but director Adele Lim puts a fresh spin, creating a world that’s recognizably human while still existing in a hyperbolic (even psychedelic) universe. She might have even established a new genre: the Asian-American Adult Comedy, infusing a Molotov cocktail of influences from The Farrelly Brothers to Kung Fu cinema to K-Pop to Porky’s.
After a clunky prologue where we meet the two main characters, the only two Asian girls in a mostly white school, we fast forward 25 years, where those same girls, Lolo (Sherry Cola) and Audrey (Ashley Park), are still besties. Their lives might’ve taken different paths, but they continue to depend on each other like they did as kids. Adopted by white parents, Audrey became an accomplished attorney, while Lolo lives in Audrey’s garage and makes vulgar –or as she calls it “sex positive”– art.
When Audrey is tasked to travel to China for work, she takes Lolo, who knows Mandarin, a language she never learned. They’re also joined by Lolo’s cousin, Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), an intensely shy Gen Z’er who gets so emotionally knotted up she disintegrates into strange outbursts. Once they arrive in China, they meet up with Audrey’s old college friend, Kat (Stephanie Hsu, Academy Award nominee for Best Supporting Actress in Everything Everywhere All At Once), a daytime soap star who’s not only in denial of her promiscuous past but covets a lascivious tattoo located in a “mysterious” place (we’ll see it later).
For Audrey, this is an important trip. If she closes the deal in China,…
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