In the current climate of play-it-safe four-quadrant studio movies and less of a middle ground than ever existing between superheroic mega-blockbusters and ‘indie’ film festival stuff, one of the most high-profile casualties has been the R-rated raunchy and/or gross-out comedy. It was always a hit-and-miss genre, but one that is much missed, which is why it’s so disappointing to say that Joy Ride, a brash attempt to hearken back to those mid-noughties glory days, is just bad. Only very sporadically funny and with some of the laziest and most listless plotting of any major movie this year, it’s far from the revival you might hope for.
It all starts promisingly enough, with high-flying lawyer Audrey (Ashley Park) sent to China by her firm to close a crucial deal. It’s a huge opportunity, made all the more pressing by the fact that it’s the first time that Audrey – adopted by a white American family at birth – is returning to her ‘home’ country. Accompanied by her sexually voracious childhood friend Lolo (Sherry Cola), and Lolo’s socially awkward cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), as her translator for the trip. It of course goes massively off the rails almost as soon as it starts, with copious drugs, a search for Audrey’s birth mother, and Audrey’s horndog college friend turned famous ‘Christian good girl’ actress Kat (Everything Everywhere breakout Stephanie Hsu) all complicating matters.
It’s a raucous premise on paper, but only occasionally proves so in practice. Writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao are both veterans of the Family Guy writers room and, for better but mostly worse, it really shows. They aren’t afraid to go all out when it comes to the sex, drugs, and vomit – with the funniest set-piece easily being a night of ridiculous sex between our four heroines and a professional Chinese basketball team – but a lot of the humour is just wacky zaniness for the sake of it, which gets old fast (a K-Pop parody song is just excruciating).
The story also barely holds together, packed with contrivances that might fly in a 20 minute cartoon, but become essentially incoherent in a 90 minute film, while the direction from Adele Lim (making her debut and best known probably as the writer of Crazy Rich Asians) is just drab, rarely allowing the punchlines to really hit home. You never really get a sense of China as a place, even as the ladies dart between cities and remote rural spaces, and so there’s a fundamentally generic atmosphere.
There are some deeper dives into the complicated feelings around un-belonging for the Asian diaspora, but the emotional work put into the characters isn’t strong enough for this to tug at the heartstrings, everyone playing the most basic possible Comedy Friendship archetypes, while only Hsu really gives a memorable performance. In a further rebut to the baffling Oscars choice to nominate Jamie Lee Curtis instead of her for Everything Everywhere, she gives real star power to her scenes, the only actor here really tapped in to the more absurd and cartoony tones that grant Joy Ride its rare memorable moments.
Right the way through to a low-powered epilogue, Joy Ride just feels *tired*. Yeah, there are a couple of decent gags here and there, and the focus on an all-female, all-Asian core cast does still feel fresh, especially in this genre, but that’s enough to make up for the long stretches without laughter and genuinely just lazy plotting and direction. Not so much a Joy Ride, then, more a nauseatingly bumpy one.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 