Joy Ride is delightful, thoughtful, and thirsty as hell

Stephanie Hsu as Kat, Sabrina Wu as Deadeye, Ashley Park as Audrey, and Sherry Cola as Lolo in Joy Ride. // Photo by Ed Araquel

There’s been discussion lately about the slow, studio-mandated death of the mid-budget comedy. It’s true there are fewer movies like Bridesmaids, Knocked Up, or Superbad hitting theaters in recent years, and the ones that have gotten a big screen release often aren’t massive hits. Good Boys, Long Shot and Blockers, for instance, are all highly entertaining (and often surprisingly sweet) movies in their own right, but their fan base — while devoted — is narrower than it should be.

If you’ve noticed a common thread among the movies listed above, it’s that most of them involve Seth Rogen, either in front of the camera or as a writer or producer. Rogen and his production company Point Grey, God bless them, seem determined to keep the mid-budget comedy alive. It’s clearly a labor of love. With their latest release, Joy Ride, Rogen and co. may have finally figured out a way to breathe new life into a formula that desperately needs it: support and promote stories from women and people of color.

Directed by Adele Lim and written by Lim, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, and Teresa Hsaio, Joy Ride features a familiar set of characters but with a gender and cultural perspective that adds depth, visual appeal, and delight. It’s dirtier than Bridesmaids, hornier than Superbad, and more meaningful than any of its predecessors put together. If this is the future of movie comedies, things are looking pretty bright.

Hyper-achieving Audrey (Ashley Park) and slacker Lolo (Sherry Cola) are lifelong besties. We first meet them as little girls, as Audrey’s white adoptive parents (David Denman and Annie Mumolo) actively seek out Lolo and her parents (Debbie Fan and Kenneth Liu) for a playdate. As an adult, Audrey is a high-powered lawyer who’s climbing the corporate ranks and earning serious money. Lolo is a struggling artist and lives in a garage in Audrey’s backyard.

When Audrey is selected by her firm to facilitate a big business deal in China, she brings Lolo along to translate for her. Lolo, in turn, invites her oddball K-pop fan cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu). Audrey also recruits her college roommate Kat (Stephanie Hsu), now a successful TV actress, to join them. The business trip turns into an epic adventure to find Audrey’s birth mother after the businessman Audrey’s been sent to meet (Ronny Chieng) insists she reconnects with her Chinese roots in order for him to accept her firm’s proposed deal.

Joy Ride provides thoughtful commentary on Asian and Asian American identity, with each of its characters experiencing different facets. Audrey, in particular, as an adoptee raised by white midwestern parents, has a lot to unpack, tackling her learned biases and struggling to see where she fits in. There are questions about gender identity, too, as the awkward Deadeye migrates more and more toward a confident nonbinary identity.

In addition to this, Joy Ride is also; it must be said, delightfully filthy.

Lim and her collaborators make these characters into sexually assertive women with different relationships toward their sexuality. Lolo is unapologetically horny (Cola is fantastically expressive when her character talks about sex), and Audrey doesn’t have any qualms about it either, though she finds Lolo’s confidence a little over the top. Kat, by comparison, is engaged to a deeply hot, deeply Christian man (Desmond Chiam) and worries her past promiscuity (and a massive tattoo on her…um…private parts) will scare him off. Hsu plays her as overly poised and judgy, which is mostly a poor cover for her intensely repressed sex drive.

This is just scratching the surface. Joy Ride also contains projectile vomit, drug trips, horny grandmas, a sex-noise-off between Cola and former basketball player Baron Davis, and a glorious scene where our heroines call on the BTS Army to help them pose as K-Pop stars.

Joy Ride, in all its raunchy, heartfelt, friend-centric goodness, feels like a true heir apparent to studio comedies of the previous decade. More than that, though, it’s interesting. We’ve seen movies about groups of women and queer friends who like having sex, but it’s not often those stories are coupled with thoughtful, personal journeys. While Joy Ride isn’t a perfect movie, it does a lot of things really well, and it stands out from many other movies of its kind. You’ll laugh, you’ll cringe, you’ll scream, and you might actually learn some stuff, too.