It would be reductive, if not entirely unfounded, to one-line Joy Ride as being Adele Lim’s ‘Asian Bridesmaids’. For a film all about heritage, the Paul Feig comedy is an inescapable ancestor. Malcolm D. Lee’s Girls Trip sits too somewhere on this most scatological of family trees. It’s less mimicry than shared intention with impressive and engaging cultural specificity. The formula is as genealogical and gynaecological. Oh but Joy Ride does it so well. What’s more, Lim delivers high on thought provocation in ways Feig never has. This is fiercely funny stuff, smart as a whip, and delivered with total reject by a pitch perfect central quartet. In short, there’s ample riding and it’s a joy to behold it.
Ashley Park and Sherry Cola are thoroughly believable as long term besties Audrey and Lolo, a duo linked at the hip from the moment the latter lamped a pint sized racist in the local play park as a tot. While Audrey’s a highflying overachiever in a world stacked against her – the only non-white associate in a Seattle legal firm – Lolo’s an artist. She’s brash, alarmingly body positive and a proud underachiever.
Together, they’re and cheese. Razor sharp writing from Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, each a second-generation Asian-American, wonders whether Audrey and Lolo would have ever been friends had they not been alone in reflecting their own image in the school yard. Amongst many commentary strengths, Joy Ride is particularly adept at denigrating the set paths and boxes that over simplify identity for a reticent global society.
When Audrey is sent to Beijing to seal a big money deal – it is assumed she can speak Mandarin for no other reason than her outward appearance – Lola tags along for the homeland good times. As does her cousin, Deadeye, who is played for laughs by a game Sabrina Wu. Over in China, three become four as the gang team with Stephanie Hsu’s Kat, a locally famous actor with Hollywood aspirations. She used to room with Audrey and college and hides a raucous past from celibate beau Clarence (Desmond Chiam): ‘no tongue until the wedding bell’s rung’. When the truth comes out, it’s completely jaw dropping and involves a memorable vagina-eye lens perspective. Just one of the film’s many skilful elevations of the lowest common denominator. The faint hearted will find their resolve well tested by Joy Ride’s more deliciously crass material.
Beneath a veneer of threesome gags, vomit and venereal montage, however, powers forth a fervently engaged feature. Puerile but potent. Naturally, Audrey barely needs to set foot in Beijing before her work-only trip falls far from the rails. Spurred on by Lola, Audrey quests to find her birth mother, having been adopted by a white American couple as a baby. To be plucked from one cultural sphere into another entirely is an experience of intense specificity but resonates here to more universal crises. Having been assimilated westwards – her favourite band is Mumford and Sons – Audrey is rendered a pariah wherever she goes, neither externally white nor internally Chinese. It’s with increasing sentiment that the film delivers its emotional sucker punch but has heart and soul enough to earn this. It’s all too easy to share Park’s tears.
For the most part, the tears are of laughter alone. A focus on set-piece comedy does, at times, finish Joy Ride’s pace, with signs of flagging energy growing in the latter stretches. There is, however, not a set-piece in the script that fails to land a hearty guffaw. The best of these is likely a train based escapade, hinged on racism and white bias, leading to dire and medicine addled consequences. after, a finisher pay off follows a stretch spent in the company of former NBA star Baron Davis, before a note-perfect K-Pop pastiche injects some musical fun and a whole new meaning is gifted The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
