#37: JOY RIDE

 

Starring Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu. Written by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, Teresa Hsiao from a story by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, Teresa Hsiao and Adele Lim. Produced by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, James Weaver, Josh Fagen, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, Teresa Hsiao and Adele Lim. Directed by Adele Lim. Running time 95 minutes long.

It's an ensemble comedy which can only mean one thing, Road Trip!

The plot sees four Chinese girls head to China under the guise of closing a business deal where some hilarity ensues to a degree, some of it funny, some of it insanely cringey and some of it downright awful. One of the girls was adopted as a baby and is very Americanised, she learns the errors of her ways and sets out to track down her birth mother. Her high-school best friend, a budding artist obsessed with sex creates bizarre sexual sculptures, while her other friend, an ex-college friend, is now a famous Chinese actress. And finally along for shits and giggles is Dead Eye is a techno nerd and friend of the artist who's there to bring a sense of wackiness and strangeness.

The four girls bicker, encounter an white American drug mule, take copious, as in, lethal amounts of drugs, have wild sex with a group of American basketball players, fall-out, pretend to be K-Pop stars, and act so outrageously it borders on the insane. Actually the sex scene is perhaps the funniest part of the film. 

Many of the jokes land, but for me the gross-out nature of the humour rang false and is merely there to shock, none more so than a pussy cat tattoo which proves to be the absolute pinnacle of the movie, or nadir depending on your point of view. I felt Bridesmaids did it far better.

Following rigidly the three act structure of Syd Fields the film is basically a series of over-the-top skits all cobbled together into a sort of plot with a feel good gooey centre and a lesson about truth and friendship and finding out who you are. At the end of act two the friends fall-out, valuable life lessons are learned and the friends reunite and bond all over again in the third act, before the obligatory 'One Year Later' caption when we see the friends embark on a new group trip. Oh, how we laughed. 

7/10