Joy Ride

Sabrina Wu as Deadeye, Ashley Park as Audrey, Sherry Cola as Lolo, and Stephanie Hsu as Kat in Joy Ride. Photo Credit: Ed Araquel

A year ago we had an Irish film of a similar name with Olivia Colman.  This couldn’t be much different.  Directorial debut by Adele Lim who scripted Crazy Rich Asians this has much the same mood and involves a road trip to China and Korea by 4 female friends. Audrey (Ashley Park) is a hotshot lawyer who was adopted by white parents from China as a child.  Now, she is returning for the first time for business.  Lolo (Sherry Cola) is her childhood friend accompanying her.  They will meet up with Kat (Stephanie Hsu) who is a star actress now in China and the fourth and incongruous member of the group is Deadeye (Sabrina Wu). In the rather far-fetched script Audrey has to prove her Chinese heritage to win a contract so she sets off to find her birth mother.  

On a train they end up nearly getting busted for drugs, get rescued in the wilderness by a basketball team they then proceed to bed, Audrey gets fired, they pretend to be a K-Pop band and finally Audrey finds family of sorts in Korea.  A final scene back in the USA shows how they move on from all this a year later.

Joy Ride. Photo Credit: Ed Araquel

What works here?  It’s a pacy movie full of jokes, which are not all funny but do raise a laugh on many occasions.  The actresses are natural comedians and it is a joy to watch the way they act.  Parks surprised me with her versatility and Cola was a star in Shortcomings.  Their energy is also vital to help us believe all the implausible plot twists such as becoming a K-Pop band called Brown Tuesday. 

You may not be so keen on the scatological references, the pussy numbers (Cardi B and other musical influences are found here) and some of the Asian jokes seem more like a clichéd stand-up comedy routine than anything else.  And of course it is good to see a comedy propelled by Asian women showing it can stand up against the best.

3 stars plus

Shortcomings

Maybe not an auspicious title, this film is based on a comic by screenwriter Adrian Tomine, and revolves around 3 characters of Asian descent.  The film starts in San Franscisco and moves to New York.  

Ben Tanaka (Justin H Min) is an unfulfilled filmmaker running a failing art cinema in the suburbs.  His long-term girlfriend Miko (Ally Maki) is getting more into Asian film and is angling to get an internship in NY.  

Alicia (Sherry Cola) is Ben’s friend, busy chasing women and keeping her lesbian status a secret from her parents.  Ben is obsessed with white women and when Miko heads off to NY he acts on his desires since he and Miko are taking a break.

Later Alicia falls in love with a part-Asian part-British woman living in NY, the cinema closes and Ben heads off to NY to discover that Miko has a new boyfriend and the relationship is over.  Not so much of a plot.  The thing is that Ben is actually quite obnoxious and opinionated most of the time so how anyone sticks with him is amazing.  

His best skill is putting his foot in it. This makes it hard to enjoy a film with such an unsympathetic central character.  He’s not evil or bad, just astonishingly unaware of others.  With Miko being rather one-dimensional the film is saved by Sherry Cola’s portrayal of Alicia with doses of sharp humour, practicality and rebellion mixed in together.  Thank god for her presence.

Maybe the film portrays a certain generation but I found it unconvincing on the Asian experience front – they could have been any race, unconvincing on the film maker front – the modern version of having the narrator be a writer by trade.  

Sort of lazy.  Randall Park and the actors do well enough but the film lacks a fire and a story to really hook us.

2 stars