Joy Ride: Film Review
Ashley Park is my favourite person in Emily in Paris so I’m thrilled she’s finally been given a leading role – in the raucous comedy Joy Ride.
She plays Asian-American lawyer Audrey Sullivan, who was adopted by white American parents as a child and is best friends with Lolo Chen (Sherry Cola), the only other Asian her age in White Hills, Seattle. When Audrey needs to go to China to secure a deal, she brings Lolo, a struggling artist who lives in her garage, to act as her translator. Naturally, the plan does not go down well – Lolo unexpectedly brings her cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) and does not get along with Audrey’s uni BFF Kat Huang (Stephanie Hsu). And then they decide to find Audrey’s birth mum while they’re out there.
How you get on with Joy Ride will really depend on your taste for dirty humour. I thought I was down for crass comedy but this actually turned out to be too vulgar and crude for my liking. Perhaps I’ve become a prude (I don’t think so though!) but I thought the film went too far and there were too many gross sex-related gags. Some of them were funny but others fell totally flat for me. It just needed to be dialled back a bit because it’s so constant in the first half that it loses its effectiveness.
Despite that, I still enjoyed the movie and laughed often and really connected with its theme of female friendship. It accurately depicts how friendships evolve over the years, how different friends serve you at different times of your life, and how they sometimes come and go and that’s OK. I also found the exploration of cultural identity really interesting – Audrey feels like she doesn’t fit in the white community at home, but she also doesn’t belong in China being raised so white. Both of these aspects are written so well and come together in such a meaningful, heartfelt way that it brought me to tears.
Park is the emotional core of the piece and is the sensible, business-focused person among chaotic characters for the most part, although she spectacularly goes off the rails at times. More leading lady parts for Park, please! Her co-stars are given more of the jokes and Cola shoulders most of the crude dialogue. I liked Wu because Deadeye is an innocent and quirky outsider who just wants some friends. I adored all of these four together and seeing their wildly different characters bounce off each other was a joy.
This year’s answer to Bridesmaids and The Hangover, Adele Lim‘s Joy Ride is a fun-filled, gross-out adventure.
In cinemas from Friday 4th August