Review: Joy Ride

Image courtesy of Lionsgate.

Director Adele Lim's feature debut, "Joy Ride," has a handful of gut-busting laughs - most notably, a playground bullying episode gone awry early in the picture - but also occasionally insightful moments involving identity and self discovery and even a touching scene or two about friendship. It's also extremely raunchy and maybe not quite as funny as some reviews may have led you to believe.

As the film opens, two young girls - a Chinese girl with parents from that country and another girl of Asian descent (I've worded this accordingly due to the possibility of spoiling a plot twist) with adoptive white parents - meet on a playground. They become fast friends and grow up to be Audrey (Ashley Park), a hotshot lawyer, and Lolo (Sherry Cola), an aspiring artist who is crashing with Audrey because her career hasn't taken off.

Audrey is being sent by her company - which is mostly comprised of douchey white guys who believe they are being allies because they threw her a "Mulan"-themed party - to Beijing to land a deal of some sort. Audrey enlists Lolo, but also college roommate and actress Kat (Stephanie Hsu), as interpreters. Lolo also brings along eccentric cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), who provides plenty of hijinks. 

The film's setup could be compared to "Bridesmaids," albeit with a cast of young Asian women, or "The Hangover" films, due to its raunchiness and the presence of Deadeye, who is the Zach Galifianakis character here. It also, oddly, bears some similarity to "Return to Seoul," a very good film from earlier this year in which a restless young French woman of Korean descent travels to her home country to find the mother who gave her away at birth.

In "Joy Ride," Audrey's business venture in Beijing becomes dependent on her finding her birth mother, who gave her away to the white couple who have been her parents all her life, after the man with whom she is doing business insists that she introduce him to her family at an upcoming event. It's a bit of a flimsy premise that acts as an excuse for the four women to travel across China and eventually - again, no spoiler here - to another country.

There are a number of funny moments to be had - the aforementioned playground scene, another in which the women must consume a massive amount of drugs to escape police notice after it turns out that the woman with whom they are sharing a train compartment is a drug dealer, and a series of sex scenes involving a basketball team that the women run across. Some other moments aren't as successful - most notably, one in which the women pose as a K-Pop band.

Similar to "Bridesmaids," and any number of other movies involving groups of longtime friends who occasionally neglect each other, there are some meaningful moments late in the picture as Audrey realizes how good her friends are to her, and there's some interesting stuff here involving the experience of not fitting in anywhere - for example, Audrey doesn't feel like she fits in with her white co-workers, whereas the fact that she has white parents and speaks only English causes her problems on the other side of the equation. 

"Joy Ride" has its moments - both funny and heartfelt - although it's not, perhaps, as daring as it intends to be. Yes, it's very raunchy, but it occasionally feels like it's trying too hard to prove something - similar to the likable "Booksmart," it aims to be more outrageous than its male comedic counterparts ("The Hangover" or "Superbad," movies that I never truly warmed to in the first place). However, "Joy Ride" succeeds in that it's better than those movies, although none of them are anywhere near as successful as "Bridesmaids," the gold standard of recent years for movies about groups of friends - men or women - behaving badly.