Movie Review: Joy Ride

Rating: 92/100

Television and film writer Adele Lim, famous for writing Crazy Rich Asians and Raya and the Last Dragon, makes her directorial debut with the hilarious R-rated road trip comedy Joy Ride. The movie follows four friends—Lolo (Sherry Cola) and Audrey (Ashley Park), two best friends who grew up together but took very different paths, along with Lolo’s cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) and Audrey’s college roommate Kat (Stephanie Hsu)—who set out on a trip to China for Audrey’s work, but the journey turns into a search to find Audrey’s birth mother.

The road trip quickly gets out of hand as they find themselves trying to hide drugs from the police, injuring most of the members of a Chinese basketball team, and performing a K-pop style rendition of “WAP.” It’s an ovaries-to-the-wall comedy that is packed with jokes that always land.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some tearful moments in amongst the laughs. Audrey finally finding what she was looking for is an absolute tearjerker. And the relationships between the characters are sincere and endearing and, whenever there are tensions between them, it becomes easy to root for them to patch things up.

One of the films stars, Wu, is nonbinary, which would have been nice to see written into the film. Deadeye is referred to as a woman throughout most of the movie. In the very last scene of the movie, after a time jump, Deadeye has a buzz cut and people are starting to refer to the character using they/them pronouns, but no explicit mention is made of the character coming out as nonbinary. Deadeye also displays some very obvious signs of autism, yet that’s never mentioned in the script, either. It would have been nice to see that representation actually make it into the script in a more explicit way. There’s one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to Lolo possibly being bi or pansexual early in the film, but that’s about as far as the queer representation in this movie goes.

That being said, Joy Ride is likely to become the sleeper comedy hit of the summer. This movie stands as proof that the best way to make a good comedy isn’t to just pack it full of white men. The filmmakers even went out of their way to find actors of the same ethnic origin as their characters, with nobody falling back on the assumption that all Asians are interchangeable. Chinese-American characters are played by Chinese-American actors, which is not always the norm in Hollywood. It’s an authentic comedy made by Asian women about their authentic experiences with a lot of laughs along the way.