Joy Ride (Adele Lim, 2023)
Adele Lim’s hilarious and completely over-the-top Joy Ride is bound to be rated as one of the year’s funniest and, yes, most explicit American comedies.
It’s about four female friends who travel through Asia in search of the birth mother of Audrey (Ashley Park), who was adopted as a baby.
Apart from Park the movie stars Sherry Cola, Stefanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu, who together form one of the best acting ensembles of the last couple of years.
Joy Ride is the directorial feature debut of Adele Lim, who gained her Hollywood breakthrough as one of the writers of the surprise smash hit Crazy Rich Asians (2018).
With Joy Ride she takes her talent for the more extreme sides of comedy one giant step further. Lim developed the femme-centric story for her feature debut with Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, with the last two also writing the screenplay.
When lawyer Audrey is sent to China to secure a business deal, she takes her childhood friend, sex-positive artist Lolo (Cola), with her, while also planning to meet up with Kat (Hsu), her best friend from college who has become a Chinese soap star. Along for the ride is Lolo’s eccentric cousin Deadeye (Wu).
Once in China nothing really goes as planned, the business deal more or less fades into the background and is replaced by a more and more frantic search for Audrey’s birth mother.
But even that is just an excuse for a no-holds-barred trip full of wild debauchery, that not only takes the girls (and their preferences) to extremes but will also test their friendship to the absolute limit.
The jokes, of which there are many, are definitely adult oriented, so it’s no surprise that, even without any nudity, the movie is rated R.
However, the girls’ shenanigans can’t obscure the fact that in the end it all boils down to a basic human question: if you don’t know where you are from, how do you know who you are?
Joy Ride is not only a very funny movie, but it also has something meaningful to say. Four stars!
Note: Joy Ride is released worldwide in the week of July 7.