Joy Ride is the funniest summer movie in years
Sex comedies are officially back! Maybe they never completely left, but the sub-genre felt as if it were suffering, scarce, or diverted to streamers as limited series. Over the last decade, only a few exceptions like Girls Trip (2017) and Blockers (2018) broke through and made a splash. Now, hot on the heels of the R-rated sex comedy No Hard Feelings doing impressive business at the box office, Joy Ride hits theaters. Joy Ride is the feature directorial debut from Adele Lim (co-screenwriter of Crazy Rich Asians) and comedy producing super duo Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (This is the End; Neighbors). It’s a raunchy road trip movie that doesn’t shy away from explicit content – so let’s be perfectly clear: it’s super dirty, and f*cking hilarious!
Joy Ride doesn’t reinvent the sex comedy or the road trip movie, but it does feature a talented foursome of young female Asian-American actors, a welcome step towards more diverse representation on screen. Audrey (Ashley Park) is a career-driven Chinese-American woman who is bringing her childhood best friend, Lolo (Sherry Cola) to help translate on a critical business trip to China. Lolo invites her awkward cousin, Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), to join their travels, and upon arriving in China, they meet up with Audrey’s best friend from college, Kat (Stephanie Hsu, of last year’s Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once). When the business trip goes sideways, the friends must get creative with their plans to help Audrey achieve her career goals. Through a debaucherous series of events, the quartet discovers challenging truths about themselves and solidifies their friendships.
The four leads are incredibly winsome together, hilariously playing off each other and willing to go to extraordinary lengths for a good laugh. Joy Ride is a hard R, and all the better for it. A few of the most shocking and dirty moments are also the most side-splittingly funny. Coming off her Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, Hsu proves she has impressive comedic timing that equals her dramatic chops. Park and Cola are infectious on screen personas. And, while Wu is making her feature film debut, her idiosyncratic performance as Deadeye is likely to become a fan favorite.
To Lim’s directing and writing credit, Joy Ride isn’t just a series of comedic set pieces (though there are a lot of them!). The film also contains an emotional throughline, culminating in a handful of memorably touching moments. Joy Ride unabashedly wears its heart on its sleeve. The tightly crafted screenplay allows the zany humor to flow freely and the heartfelt scenes to feel focused and sincere. Yet all the components wrap up nicely in ninety minutes, aka the perfect running time for a studio comedy.
Joy Ride takes a lot of risks to deliver the most laugh-out-loud moments possible. It will shock you, entertain you, and move you, leaving you wiping tears from your eyes from both too much laughter and a few legitimately earned cries. R-rated comedies are an endangered species, but to see them making a comeback is heartening. We should hope this trend continues, because if future adult comedies are like Joy Ride, they’ll be worth the ride.
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Joy Ride opens today in Bay Area theaters.
