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 ]}

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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
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