94 min | R | July 7, 2023 | Lionsgate
Audrey, a Chinese American adoptee raised in a white town, flies to China for work and drags her three most unhinged friends along for the ride. The business trip turns into a raunchy hunt for the birth mother she has never met. It gets filthy, then it gets real.
Audrey is a Chinese American lawyer raised by white parents in a mostly white town. She travels to China to close a business deal and brings her loud childhood best friend Lolo along for cover. The trip detours into a search for the birth mother Audrey has never met. Three more women get pulled into the wreckage. Joy Ride wraps an aggressive gross-out comedy around a real question about who claims you when neither culture fully does.
Ashley Park plays Audrey as a woman who built her whole self around fitting in and watches that self crack on foreign ground. She holds the straight-man center while everyone around her detonates. Sherry Cola plays Lolo with crude, deafening loyalty that masks her own stalled ambition as an artist. Stephanie Hsu plays Kat, a Chinese soap star hiding a filthy past behind a born-again fiance, and she sells the panic of a lie about to collapse. Sabrina Wu plays Deadeye as a deadpan oddball who steals scenes by underplaying every one around them. The four build a friendship that survives the worst things the script does to it.
Adele Lim directs her first feature and stages the chaos with control. The script by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao escalates each set piece past the point of comfort and then keeps pushing. The big comic sequences land because the editing holds on the reactions a beat longer than expected. Lim drops in a fantasy musical number that breaks the film’s reality and earns the swing. The movie shifts from raunch to grief in the final act and the gear change does not grind.
Joy Ride works because the filth has a spine. The jokes go for the throat. The story underneath them goes for the heart. Audrey’s search is not a gimmick built to hang gags on. It is the reason the gags hit. The film knows exactly what it is and never apologizes for a second of it.