Review of Joy Ride, directed by Adele Lim

I kept getting hit with the Joy Ride trailer whenever I was going to the theater on my subscription, and despite it being straight my alley when it comes to the kind of movies I watch (we stan Asian American excellence in film), I was really on the fence of going out to see this. For some reason I kept cancelling my ticket to see this and then rebooking it.

Thirty minutes before the trailers were supposed to start, I ended up cancelling it again, realizing I was being so stupid thinking that I was too lazy to drive to the movies (which were literally only ten minutes away), and then I dragged myself out of the house in order to see this.

I’m really glad I did end up seeing this. I wish there was more of audience when I went because this is the perfect movie to see with a bunch of people who love to laugh and react.

I was in the theater with an older couple behind me and what looked to be a girl my age to my right. They were all reacting and crackling as the film went on, so I can’t imagine what it would be like seeing this movie in a packed theatre. I guess that is my one and only regret at the end of the day.

Onwards with the review!

Raised by a white family and now a successful lawyer, Audrey finds herself in China during a business trip. Things don’t go as planned.

The opening of Joy Ride is a bit of an origin story. Two Chinese American parents bring their daughter to the playground and curse about how there’s no diversity, only white people, when a white couple comes up to them and asks if they’re Chinese.

What looks like it might be a racist encounter ends well when their daughter, Audrey, is revealed to be an Asian adoptee. The Chinese family’s daughter, Lolo, decides to play with Audrey, and together they establish that they’re going to be best friends as the only two Asian girls in town.

The years pass by and they defend each other in school and through all the tough moments.

Audrey grows up to be super white washed and a successful lawyer, while Lolo makes sex positive art that makes her seem like she’s horny 24/7. Lolo also lives in Audrey’s shed (it looks nicer than it sounds), and is now coming with her on her upcoming business trip to China.

We get a quick snapshot of Audrey’s work situation: full of white men, and her boss constantly makes offensive comments because Audrey’s Asian. She doesn’t notice it at first because she’s white washed, which is the sad reality of her situation—until it confronts her full force.

Lolo and Audrey head to the airport and Audrey finds out that Lolo’s cousin, Deadeye, is coming. Deadeye isn’t exactly the best kind of social in American society—they’re awkward and they don’t really communicate well outside of their love for K-pop.

Audrey makes a mean comment about Deadeye and when they land in Beijing, they realize Deadeye actually is staying with them and not meeting up with their K-pop fan friends. So off they go to the set of a popular Chinese drama, which Audrey’s college best friend, Kat, is starring in.

We meet Kat and her fiance, Chancey, who we quickly come to realize is a devout Christian who doesn’t believe in sex before marriage. Kat is very much not a virgin and very horny, but he doesn’t know this yet. Later that night, when Audrey tries to close down the deal, the business executive tells her to bring her real mother to a party with her parents because Lolo improvised on the spot after Audrey puked all over the man.

So they begin a different journey, as they now have a week to find Audrey’s birth mother before it’s too late for the business deal.

They board a train to head out to Audrey’s adoption agency, but Audrey, because she doesn’t want to sit with any Asian people, chooses the one white girl on the train to sit in the compartment with. As it turns out, big mistake. Everyone except her thinks the girl is suspicious, and it turns out she’s a drug dealer.

She makes them do all her cocaine, frames them in front of the police, and then steals the bag full of their passports. Lolo saves the day while on the side of the road with her weird DMs to a basketball player, and the basketball team picks them all up.

Cue: the weirdest sex scene on screen I’ve ever seen. They end up screwing up multiple team members physically, not just sexually, in the process, and they are denied the bus the next morning. Somehow, they still make it to Lolo’s family, and they love Audrey.

But when she visits the woman who knew her birth mother, she discovers she’s not actually Chinese. Her mother was a South Korean national. So when one of Deadeye’s friends tries to smuggle them to Seoul while making them pose as K-pop idols, Kat’s life is ruined when her skirt rips and exposes her vulva and vagina tattoo to Lolo’s livestream.

Audrey loses her job while in Seoul, the deal is off, and the girls have a big fight. Audrey goes to find her birth mom, finds out she’s actually dead, and then she heads home.

We later have the sappy reunion scene where they all make up, and Chancey and Kat end up being fine and have sex. Before marriage. How sinful.

Overall Thoughts

This movie was hilarious. The girl next to me was dying and kept shouting “what the fuck” during certain scenes, and the people behind me were dying too during those scenes. Like I said, I’m so glad I ended up seeing this in a theater.

There were some moments that had me scratching my head though culturally—the Seoul scenes did not look like Korea at all. Even the gravestone Audrey’s mother was buried in does not look like a Korean cemetery.

But overall I thought this was such a fun, genuine movie in the end!

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