Review: Joy Ride

Joy Ride
Cert: 15 / 95 mins / Dir. Adele Lim / Trailer

Having been raised in America by adoptive white parents, Chinese-born Audrey (Ashley Park) is due to make a business-trip to her spiritual motherland where her best friend Lolo (Sherry Cola) tags along for moral support and suggests that Audrey should use the opportunity to track down her birth-mother. Along the way they're joined by Lolo's awkward friend Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), and once in China Audrey is reunited with her college-bestie Kat (Stephanie Hsu), who is now an actress on the brink of stardom.

When Audrey realises that connecting with her birth-mother could actually help her close the deal as well as bringing her personal fulfilment, the four undertake a fish-out-of-water transformational road trip to find her, find themselves and each other...

TEEN

So, the comedic sub-genre which gave us teen jaunts at the end of the last millennium and ratcheted up to pre-midlife-crises less than a decade later, has now taken the next step by transplanting the central plank of four American white men with four Asian-American women*¹. And while that kind of over-simplification does not help sell Joy Ride's many high-points and all they have to offer audiences on a broader cultural scale, it's no less true for that. The screenplay here is banking on its audience being familiar with the journey in advance, because it knows that the average punter can only handle so much being 'different'.

From the off, internal friction comes from Audrey being the successful lawyer archetype who fears she's out of her depth, Lolo is the loudmouthed but well-meaning slacker, Kat is the preening actress with devastating insecurities and Deadeye is the socially-crippled wildcard. All four of these are treated well by the film, but almost everyone else is a sketched-in placeholder. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (of Superbad fame) are named in the producer's-list and it shows. True to genre-form, Teresa Hsiao and Cherry Chevapravatdumrong's script isn't afraid to use profanity in lieu of crafted punchlines, as well as lazy but well-meaning gags about racism and sex organs in the same vein.

WERE

For all the extremity of the jokes, director Adele Lim does display genuine heart and sincerity when it comes to characters finding the line between discovering their past as a means of belonging to something, but not letting the weight of that heritage hold them back from forging their own futures. Ashley Park's scene with Daniel Dae Kim and Michelle Choi-Lee late in the movie is utterly delightful. If anything it's a shame that this emotion acts as a coda to the third act, rather than its backbone.

But for all this reviewer's cynicism, the bottom line is that Joy Ride works as a perfectly serviceable Saturday night comedy. It's a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel, but there's no denying that most of the jokes do land firmly as a result. The final product may not be especially unique, but the film does what the film does perfectly within its own remit.

HEINZ

And yet much like No Hard Feelings currently doing the rounds, this smacks of a screenplay that's been floating across various desks for the last twenty years. There are clear demographic reasons why this version of the movie wouldn't have been greenlit back in the early 00s*², and it's debatable if the 2023-iteration is pushing boldly forward or just playing catchup.

Joy Ride is, though, indecently decent. And I'm adding points for the deserved use of Maroon 5 and Mumford & Sons as a deadpan punchline. But I'm taking points off for the big emotional monologue in the restaurant-finale that drops in 'greatest-hits' clips of the movie we've all just sat through, and taking more points off for having the diners burst into applause at the end of it.

There are some places we just don't need to go back to...

*¹ Don't write in. I'm very aware as I write that line that Sabrina Wu is non-binary, as is their character in the film, Deadeye. And I love and respect the fuck out of that (especially the fact that it's addressed in the script but doesn't turn into A Thing), but I assure you that on a marketing, demographic and "being The Hangover but the opposite of that" level, this ticks all the boxes of A Film About Four Women. Less is more, and in the context of Joy Ride it's probably the only thing in the movie which is underplayed. This is also way more queer-friendly than any version of the movie with four blokes would be, and is better for it... ^{[ BACK ]}

*² For what it's worth Joy Ride was part of Cineworld's Secret Screening programme, where viewers didn't know what they'll be watching until the BBFC card after the ads and trailers. Always a gamble. And given the very non-Caucasian angle of the movie, fair play to the one couple who at least waited through a full twenty minutes of dick-jokes before deciding this wasn't for them and leaving early. Because I had immediate visions of this being The Hate U Give all over again, where just under 30 punters walked out in the first ten minutes, presumably because they all remembered they'd left the iron on or something. That must have been it, yes... ^{[ BACK ]}

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: M3GAN

M3GAN
Cert: 15 / 102 mins / Dir. Gerard Johnston / Trailer

Gerard Johnston's cyber-chiller is the story of a software engineer, Gemma (Allison Williams), who masterminds a next-level interactive toy; a life-sized android of a little girl named M3GAN (Model 3 Generative ANdroid) complete with an artificial intelligence which exponentially grows and adapts to its owner/subject. When Gemma's niece Cady (Violet McGraw) is orphaned in an horrendous traffic collision, she is awarded interim custody of the child whilst trying to juggle a modern, independent life and her demanding career. When M3GAN appears to be the perfect companion for the grieving Cady, Gemma sees this as indicative of the projects success, while her boss David (Ronny Chieng) sees this as indicative of a product which needs to be hurried through production to maximise profits. But no one seems quite prepared for how M3GAN attaches herself to Cady, and the lengths to which the surrogate babysitter will go to protect the pair of them from outside harm...

Now, narrative cinema requires a suspension of disbelief from its audience; the ability to forget they're sitting in a room with a bunch of strangers watching a series of rapidly projected images created by hundreds of people thousands of miles away for millions of dollars, and a willingness to buy into the in-universe reality and emotion of the story they're being told. Science fiction and horror need this above all else, because of the logical unbelievability of their content.

Director Johnston, along with screenwriter Akela Cooper and story-lead James Wan, require what can only be described as several gargantuan leaps of faith from the media-savvy viewer in 2023. They are asked (indeed, expected) to believe that a) a doll of this technological and mechanical complexity can be fully developed and then produced to retail at $10k, b) that there will be enough takers in the domestic, suburban market to make this a viable business model, rather than using the same tech to create workers for hazardous environments (ie the replicants in Blade Runner), and c) that aunt Gemma is in any remote or meaningful way equipped to be the legal and moral guardian of a traumatised child, despite her not being sure and every single other character in the film (including the robot) confirming this doubt repeatedly. The last of these challenges is where reality just hangs up its gloves for the rest of the movie...

HAMMER

So this write-up feels like it's peaked already, but there's no way to skirt around the elephant in the room. M3GAN isn't awful, but it's a long, long way from being great. Oddly slow to start (given that it's a movie which is perfectly encapsulated by its 2½ minute trailer), this is a social satire implemented with a hammer rather than a scalpel, practically winking at the camera every time one of the vacuous adult characters makes a pointed comment about technology being loud, confusing or unstable, like it's been script-edited by a committee of Daily Mail readers.

It's not that the film is stupid - it's really not - but in order for this to be smart it needs nuance, and that's something to which the budget would not stretch. In producing this film it apparently took twelve million dollars to create a screen-realistic synthetic human that looks deliberately false for story reasons, but authentic enough to be perfect as the film's uncanny antagonist. And yet Hollywood™ still can't find anyone who can convincingly Photoshop together a mantlepiece photo of three actors who are supposed to be on family vacation together...

Weirdly, while the central performance of the eponymous android is every bit as believable as the story requires, the whole thing is repeatedly hamstrung by the surrounding humans making the simplest mistakes, dumbest assumptions and most tonally myopic oversights that the genre has ever witnessed. It's not that you're rooting for the robot exactly, but M3GAN certainly seems like the most level-headed character.

ESCHER

To be fair, there are positives in all this. The film holds a very respectable number of female characters, not just the story-leads but in supporting positions too. It never overplays this or makes it a thing (so forgive me for making it a thing), but this really works in M3GAN's favour as not feeling too much like a standard studio-horror. There are also a handful of scenes where Johnston and the cast finally embrace the silliness of the situation and effectively turn it into an eighties slasher movie. These are very welcome, but they're too few and far between to be a defining feature.

The cast give it their all as far as they're able; of my varying problems with the film, acting isn't among them (although it's worth noting that young Violet McGraw is great at playing 'emotionally scarred' to the point of absolute unlikability; as previously noted, zero nuance). Allison Williams carries the lead well, completely aware that her character's flaws are integral to the plot mechanics. First and foremost though, the combination of Amie Donald's physical performance, Jenna Davis' vocalisations, and the model-making, animatronic and digital artistry which completes M3GAN herself is, if anything, beautifully understated. Because the audience is told the character is artificial, the need to find flaws in the presentation immediately evaporates, focusing attention on the story. That the story isn't particularly great*¹ is by the by, but yeah...

M3GAN isn't trashy enough to be fun, and it's not clever enough to be provocative. Passable Friday-night fare, what this wants is to mix philosophical morality with self-aware satire and cutting edge visuals, like a 21st century take on Shelley's Frankenstein by way of Ex Machina. Instead, this is Lawnmower Man for the TikTok generation*², desperately hoping the 'what if' will be loud enough to drown out the 'yeah but how?...

It'll make money though, so at least Blumhouse's largest box is ticked, right?

*¹ Spoilers, highlight-to-read: At the climax of Act III it turns out that the robot isn't remotely waterproof, which feels like the shittest thus-far-ignored plot progression since H.G. Wells painted himself into a corner and made all the Martians catch a cold so that his story could end without everybody just dying. That isn't the clincher, though: in an actually-telegraphed move, it's shown that anyone could have just stabbed M3GAN in the face at literally any point to stop things getting out of hand. [/end]
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*² Yeah it's easy for me to be that snarky, but it's also easy for the film to try and be better. ^{[ BACK ]}

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.