Joy Ride review: Come for the masturbation jokes, stay for the humanity

‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu co-stars in a comedy that’s as gross-out as it is sweet-toothed

In the dirty-minded yet sweet-toothed comedy Joy Ride, athletic threesomes and balloons of cocaine stuffed up internal cavities help resolve the tricky battles of identity and self-image. Crazy Rich Asians screenwriter Adele Lim, in her directorial debut, works off a script by Family Guy’s Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, for a film about reckless, luckless people you can’t help but fall in love with.

The film starts with a comedy staple: the odd couple besties. Lawyer Audrey (Ashley Park) is strait-laced and high achieving, while artist Lolo (Sherry Cola) is free and foul-mouthed. It’s a simple set-up fleshed out by more intricate character work – Audrey was adopted in China by white, American parents. To Lolo, her love of Mumford & Sons, among other things, makes her “basically white”. Her work involves laughing off her all-male, all-white office’s feeble attempts at “allyship” (case in point: they threw her a Mulan-themed birthday party).

Lolo, meanwhile, was raised by Chinese immigrant parents. She’s more familiar and more plainly comfortable with her identity. And yet, the sculptures she makes – sexually explicit versions of traditional imagery, like waving maneki-neko cat figures with gigantic, lolling tongues – still hint at some buried tension. Ashley has convinced her employers that she’s fluent in Mandarin and so invites Lolo along on a business trip to Beijing to be her furtive guide. Lolo, in turn, invites her K-pop-obsessed, permanently expressionless cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu). Once in Beijing, Audrey brings the trio to meet her old college roommate, Kat (Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Stephanie Hsu), the star of a popular, local melodrama. She’s engaged to a devout Christian (Desmond Chiam) who is clueless about his beloved’s sexual history or fondness for vaginal tattoos.

Joy Ride is a full-blooded, gross-out comedy. But its jokes about upchucking thousand-year-old eggs or masturbating to Splinter from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles serve a double purpose – the punchlines are funny and weird enough to prod at the messiness of dual identities, and the backwards presumptions people have about Audrey, and that Audrey has about China. Her rush to cosy up with the one white, English speaker on a busy train backfires spectacularly. Lim keeps pace with the script, especially when the film barrels headfirst into a K-pop cover of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP”, which serves as a triumphant ode to cross-cultural horniness.

Hsu and Cola balance the mania well against Park’s straight woman sincerity, but it’s Wu, a rising star on the standup scene, who serves as Joy Ride’s surprise MVP. Deadeye is a gender-nonconforming (Wu themself is non-binary), clearly autistic-coded character who, in almost any other comedy film, would serve as the sideline weirdo who cracks a few jokes and then disappears into the background. But Deadeye, even as a supporting character, is given space to explore their gender identity, confront feelings of alienation from their family, act as the neutral ground between bickering friends, and find validation in the social bonds of fandom. That’s the joy of a dumb-smart comedy like Joy Ride – its humanity sneaks around the corner and catches you unprepared.

Dir: Adele Lim. Starring: Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu, Sabrina Wu, Ronny Chieng. 15, 95 minutes.

‘Joy Ride’ is in cinemas from 4 August