“Joy Ride” follows four Asian-American friends as they bond and discover the truth of what it means to know and love who you are while they travel through Asia in search of one of their birth mothers.
Ashley Park, as Audrey, is a Chinese girl adopted by American parents (David Denman and Annie Mumolo). The movie opens with a young Audrey (Isla Rose Hall) and Lolo (Chloe Pun) shepherded by their parents in a predominantly white people’s park. Lolo pushes back on a racist playground bully, and the two girls quickly become lifelong friends.
Although taunted in middle school, Lolo encourages Audrey to ignore the trash talk. Taking the advice to heart, Audrey wins numerous scholastic accolades over the years, culminating in graduation from law school. Afterward, she finds herself on the partner track at a large legal firm full of white guys she regularly beats at squash. She learns that if she can close a pending deal in Beijing, she will transfer to Los Angeles as a full partner.
Meanwhile, Lolo (Sherry Cola) has become an aspiring artist and entrepreneur with a fetish for expressing sexuality. This is the jumping-off point for an unending stream of racy, bawdy humor that appears to know no limits. When Lolo learns that Audrey is traveling abroad, she invites herself and her cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) along.
Upon arriving in Beijing, the group meets Audrey’s old college friend Kat (Stephanie Hsu). Her fiancé, Clarence (Desmond Chiam), is Kat’s co-star in a popular Chinese television series. They have been dating for three years as devout Christians, though Kat had a far more scandalous and promiscuous youth than she represents to Clarence.
Since they have traveled all the way to China, Lolo constantly entreats Audrey to seek out her birth mother, despite protestations. The situation exacerbates when Lolo blurts out the suggestion again to the prospective Chinese-based merger partner. Believing in knowing where one comes from, he insists that Audrey bring her birth mother to the deal closing at the end of the week.
The quest begins on a bullet train to the adoption agency, where the group gets mixed up with a drug dealer just before the authorities start a search. The women scramble to hide the bundles of cocaine in some awkward places on their persons. Rather than perform searches on bodily orifices for smuggled contraband, the Chinese police decide instead to eject the party into the countryside. In the process, everyone’s passport gets stolen. Rescued by friends of Lolo – an international soccer team in their chartered bus – they proceed on the next leg of the journey. At their hotel, crude sexual encounters with Audrey, Lolo, Kat, and various soccer team members ensue.
Once reaching the adoption agency, Audrey learns that her mother is actually Korean. Nonetheless, the group remains undaunted. However, without passports, they are forced to pass themselves off as a K-pop band to get to Korea. Regretfully, the customs agent in China doesn’t believe them, so they rip into an impromptu song and dance routine. Something else also rips when a wardrobe malfunction exposes a scandalously large tattoo of a devil’s face on Kat’s shaved vagina. A smartphone captures everything quite graphically, and the video immediately goes viral.
Despite the show, the customs agent remains unconvinced. As a result, instead of traveling by jet, the tortuous trip to Korea takes place with Audrey and crew as stowaways in the bowels of a container ship replete with live chickens. Eventually, Audrey reunites with her birth mother – after a fashion – but tanks the merger deal in the process. The failure costs Audrey her job, unexpectedly putting her on a path to self-discovery. There is more, but you get the idea.
“Joy Ride” seems to want to reproduce the success of movies like “The Hangover” by using many of the same plot contrivances. Unfortunately, the writers rely far too heavily on raunchy and not-always-funny one-liners as a crutch instead of better developing the narrative and its characters.
Directed by Adele Lim and written by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao – all three of whom put the storyline together – “Joy Ride” never quite comes together the way the creators clearly intended. There’s a lot going on, but all the action merely serves as a vehicle to pump out large quantities of low-grade comedic material.
In Theaters Friday, July 7th
