When Audrey (Ashley Park) gets the chance to visit China to close a business deal, she takes along her friend Lolo (Sherry Cola), who invites her weird, K-pop-obsessed cousin DeadEye (Sabrina Wu). In China, the girls meet up with Audrey's college friend Kat (Stephanie Hsu), formerly a horny wild-girl, but now an actress famous in China for playing good girls and saving herself for marriage. The four wind up on an Odyssey to find Audrey's Chinese birth mother, and there you go.
It's not a bad setup for a raunchy, road-trip comedy, featuring Asian women instead of black women, college guys, or middle-aged dudes. I guess everyone needs their own road-trip movie, and now Asian girls have theirs. I found it distracting how focused on race the characters were, but maybe that's how it is when you're a minority. As a white dude in a place that is mostly white, it's easy for me not to think about race. Audrey and Lolo, as the only Asians in their small, Ohio town, were probably never allowed to forget that they look different from everyone else. As Audrey says in Beijing, “If I lived here, I wouldn't always be the 'Asian girl'. I could be the 'smart girl' or the 'funny, nice girl'”.
As road-trip comedies go, “Joy Ride” is reasonably watchable. Director Adele Lim is best known as a writer on “Crazy Rich Asians”, but here, in her directorial debut, she shows promise behind the camera. She gets decent performances from a talented group of comediennes, and she keeps the story humming along, bringing it together in an hour and a half, which is remarkably concise for a movie these days. “Joy Ride” is not going to change your life, but if you want an uncomplicated laugh, take the ride.
3 stars out of 5
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