Directed by: Adele Lim
Starring: Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu, Sherry Cola, Sabrina Wu, Desmond Chiam, David Denman, Chris Pang
Joy Ride is a road buddy comedy which is eager to please and even more eager to display its raunchy side. The result, even with a game cast, is an uneven comedy straining for laughs and not finding many. The joy ride in question takes four Asian-American friends on a road trip through China, where attorney Audrey (Park) and her lifelong best friend Lolo (Cola) travel so Audrey can close a lucrative business deal for her firm and locate her biological mother who gave her up for adoption. Tagging along are Deadeye (Wu) and American actress Kat (Hsu), who works on a Chinese soap opera and is engaged to her religious co-star (Chiam), who thinks Kat is also a virgin. We know otherwise.
In storylines which are more difficult to recall one week after viewing, Audrey has trouble closing her deal because her potential client invites her and her mother to a party which Lolo agrees to on Audrey's behalf. Audrey is now in a race against time to locate her birth mother, but this isn't a pressing concern when they encounter a basketball team and do the rumpy-pumpy with some of its members. When trying to charter a private plane to visit another city in China, they are forced to pose as a K-pop group with one of Lolo's Instagram friends posing as their manager. Audrey then discovers she is not Chinese at all, but Korean by birth. When she locates her birth mother, the scene is handled with such tenderness that it seems dropped in from another movie. A better one.
Joy Ride then morphs into a tale of the power of friendship and female camaraderie in the final act with obligatory fallings-out followed by tearful reunions played out predictably. Joy Ride tries to supply the energy to situations we've seen numerous times over the years, but it all feels like same old, same old. The only thing missing is the bonding scene where everyone smokes weed, but for all I remember, there is a scene like that.
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