Joy Ride: an overstuffed road movie romp

Diasporic anxieties and road-movie romps collide in this comedy by first-time director Adele Lim (co-writer of the milestone hit Crazy Rich Asians (2018), about Chinese-American friends capering across the motherland. Energised by a tonally wild, all-guns-blazing style, Joy Ride tries to revel in an ostentatious debauchery that’s perhaps not as subversive as the film hopes.

The unlikely quartet of friends centres around high-flying lawyer Audrey (Ashley Park), a transracial adoptee raised in the US who flaunts a model minority sheen – manifested in the fact that she “doesn’t like boba and never fucked an Asian guy”, according to her irreverent best friend Lolo (Sherry Cola). Audrey’s old roommate Kat (Stephanie Hsu, from Everything Everywhere All at Once), now a C-drama ingénue disowning her risqué college days, and Lolo’s K-pop obsessed cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), join them for the ride. The high-jinks heavy script unwinds at a frenzied pace – voracious cocaine consumption, gross-out puking, accident-prone threesomes, and a surreal K-pop cover of Cardi B’s ‘WAP’ trip over each other, scrambling for a secure place in the story. And then there’s the plot baggage: business deals to be signed, birth mothers to be found, friendships to be restored.

Despite the narrative velocity, it all risks eliding into just – stuff, an everything bagel with a hollowness to boot. The succession of high-concept set pieces self-consciously draws on ensemble comedies like Bridesmaids (2011) and Girls Trip (2017), but the film struggles to match them in either laugh count or plausibility of group dynamic. The emotional beats come from a question of authenticity: is the “practically white” Audrey Asian enough? Is it language, parenting or community that can invest her with the sparkle of cultural legitimacy? But beyond the crammed-in quippy asides – references to Chinese people taking their shoes off in the house, or Asian grandmas calling you fat – and a mildly refreshing third-act twist, the film’s insistence on predictable, plaintive resolutions only buttresses its by-the-numbers texture.

The road trip comedy is predicated upon the promise of self-discovery: through the chaotic mischief of being away from home, you will come to know yourself. Joy Ride’s gambit is that the genre can still make good on its promise when the discovery is not about work, or relationships, or lifestyle, but the labyrinthine category of racial identity itself – when the distinction of being ‘away’ or ‘at’ home is already obscured. It’s an impressive ambition, but one that’s painfully auxiliary to the film’s endless roll-call of febrile antics.

 ► Joy Ride is in UK cinemas from 4 August.