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This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Adele Lim, whose name you might remember for having co-written Crazy Rich Asians and Raya and the Last Dragon takes the only reasonable direction you could hope she’d go from there, by making a raunchy comedy in the company of Seth Rogen – for Asian-American women! It’s an easy enough selling point for a film like Joy Ride, but the greatest strengths of the film are best stated by how it is unafraid of embracing how these girls might maintain one image in front of most – but are capable of being as weird and disgusting as they please. It’s that recklessness which carries Joy Ride all the way through, and it also makes the trip a delightful one at that.

As children, Audrey and Lolo were best friends. Audrey (Ashley Park) is an Asian adoptee of white parents who has become a successful attorney, and Lolo (Sherry Cola) is a sex-positive artist who’s never afraid to speak her mind whose parents are Chinese immigrants. On a business trip to Beijing, Lolo serves as her interpreter – and the two of them bring along Audrey’s former college classmate Kat (Stephanie Hsu) and Lolo’s socially awkward K-pop loving cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) along the way. As this mismatched group of friends comes along for a ride together, they find themselves getting more than what they asked for in a trip that includes lots of sex, drugs, and some self-discovery. Which might just as well be the formula for most raunchy comedies made within the 2000’s, but it’s still very funny all throughout.

Like every great raunchy comedy from the 2000’s, there’s not a moment in Joy Ride that holds back from showing how dirty these friends truly are. The movie takes pride in that horniness and embraces that, but even underneath how dirty it all shows itself to be on the surface, it’s very sweet deep down. Thankfully, those elements don’t seem to come at odds with one another – particularly in this case, being a film all about the Asian-American diaspora. It all starts from covering the experiences of the children of Asian immigrants versus Asian adoptees of white parents, but even the misconceptions about experiences shared by Asians in America.

While there’s no doubt that a specificity to the jokes is to be found in Joy Ride pertaining to Asian viewers, there’s more than enough being offered for viewers of all sorts. Working from a script written by Teresa Hsiao and Family Guy alumni Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, Adele Lim boasts a great sense of confidence in using their own words to let the four women do everything that they feel like. Not every joke lands, but the ones that do are the ones you’ll be remembering even after it ends. But talking the specificity of the Asian experience, in particular, is a scene where Deadeye comes up with the idea to pose as a fake K-Pop girl group to bypass airport security, first from being a perfect portrait of the mania of K-Pop fandom on the screen down to a hilariously inaccurate music video parody of an idol group performing Cardi B’s “WAP.”

It also helps that the central performances from all four leads bounce perfectly off one another when playing different archetypes of Asian-Americans. Ashley Park is especially funny within the role of the Asian-American adoptee of white parents, best emphasized in scenes she shares around white colleagues who have a misguided sense of allyship. Those who’d already seen her in Everything Everywhere All at Once won’t be let down when seeing Stephanie Hsu as an actress who seems to have everything in order, which makes her scenes opposite the foul-mouthed Sherry Cola’s role all the more delightful. But out of all the four, I’ve found that it was Sabrina Wu, as the socially awkward K-Pop lover who stood out to me as the funniest. Wu steals every scene they’re in, in particular because they’re the most over-the-top of the four. And they were just never afraid to hold back, which is something I love seeing in a movie like this.

It’s hilarious, but very heartfelt – I think that’s always been a key to a great raunchy comedy, especially as we’d seen within the early 2000’s. All the dirtiness you’d expect from the way the film opens with how Audrey and Lolo meet for the first time as kids doesn’t let down. But neither does the lasting power of the gang’s friendship, even if it’s a route you’d expect for most films of this sort. A film like this earns those moments though, but if anything, I’m very much looking forward to what Adele Lim has next in store behind the camera.

Watch the trailer right here.

All images via Lionsgate.

Directed by Adele Lim
Screenplay by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, Teresa Hsiao
Produced by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, James Weaver, Josh Fagen, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, Teresa Hsiao, Adele Lim
Starring Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu, Sabrina Wu, Ronny Chieng, David Denman, Annie Mumolo
Release Date: July 7, 2023
Running Time: 95 minutes