Joy Ride
“Asian women get to be sexy, horny, and messy in Joy Ride, rather than exotified or leered at through a white male gaze.”
Title: Joy Ride (2023)
Director: Adele Lim 👩🏻🇲🇾🇺🇸
Writers: Cherry Chevapravatdumrong 👩🏻🇺🇸, Teresa Hsiao 👩🏻🇺🇸, and Adele Lim 👩🏻🇲🇾🇺🇸
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
—SPOILERS AHEAD—
Technical: 4.75/5
Bawdy, fresh, and hilarious, Adele Lim’s Joy Ride had my theater in stitches. Its setup of ragtag friends reuniting on vacation certainly has its foremothers—Bridesmaids (2011) and Girls Trip (2017) come to mind, with obligatory bits like where everyone gets way too high treading overly familiar ground. (Lim thankfully keeps it short and sweet.) And a K-pop interpretation of Cardi B’s “WAP” swings for the rafters, but there’s no way to reference the hit single without mentally comparing the two, which leaves Joy Ride’s rendition sorely lacking. These quibbles aside, however, Lim puts an Asian American topspin on the genre, creating something wholly new, with emotional underpinnings that work surprisingly well for a screwball comedy. I laughed, I cried … this film has it all. True to its name, Joy Ride is an exhilarating, R-rated time at the movies that’s well worth the price of admission.
Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
Considering its female and nonbinary protagonists, plus writing and direction by all women behind the lens, this category is a doozy. Nor does Joy Ride just have representation by the numbers; the film’s narrative concerns itself with the life-affirming bonds between its main characters. High-achieving adoptee, Audrey (Ashley Park), finds herself on a search for her birth mother in China while navigating her relationship with her childhood best friend, Lolo (Sherry Cola). As for Lolo, she begrudgingly develops a new friendship with Audrey’s other best friend, celebrity Kat (Stephanie Hsu), all while Lolo’s cousin and BTS ARMY fan Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) serves as the socially awkward but lovable heart of the crew. Impressively, Joy Ride balances all these story arcs—plus a whopping dose of ridiculousness—without skipping a beat.
Race: 5/5
Lim is no stranger to breaking barriers for Asian American content as a Malaysian American writer, and now, director. With screenplay credits as illustrious as Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon (2021), she certainly has experience navigating the sometimes supercharged waters of working on “the first Asian American XYZ.” While Crazy Rich Asians caught flak for its classism and colorism, and Raya felt slightly generic due to a pan-Southeast Asian fantasy world, Joy Ride has, so far, escaped a consensus of social criticisms.
Developed in tandem with writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, who are Thai American and Chinese American, respectively, the movie shows its confidence in the material by crafting ethnicity-based jokes that hit just right, often riffing on the biases that can be found within Asian groups. In one of its funniest scenes, Lolo (who’s Chinese American) profiles different people in Beijing’s airport: People from Shanghai? Bougie. Taiwanese people? Weird, but cute. By the time Audrey attempts to chime in, mistaking a group of Korean people for Chinese and getting shot down for “being racist,” my theater audience was roaring. Trust, these are not lines that white writers can get away with—a fact that adds a frisson of “in the know” naughtiness to every punchline about Chinese or Asian people that never punches down, nor feels mean-spirited.
And even though Joy Ride never forgets to be funny, it adds depth by casually commenting on internalized racism and reclaiming sexuality for Asian women. In addition, Asian adoptee Patrick Armstrong gives a thoughtful summary of his mixed feelings on Joy Ride’s trailer, raising questions about whether or not the film took the right steps in portraying the adoptee community with sensitivity.
These topics barely scratch the surface of what Joy Ride touches on. To its credit, it leaves it up to the viewer how much or how little they want to stop and analyze these undercurrents. The themes are there, if you want to look—but it’s also fantastically entertaining if you just want to unplug and take it all in at face value.
Bonus for LGBTQ: +0.75
Though sex comedies featuring queer Gen Z teens have been taking Hollywood by storm via titles like Netflix’s Sex Education (2019–), Booksmart (2019), and Bottoms (2023), all set in high school, it’s a little rarer to watch adults in their late twenties and early thirties break out of the cis and straight paradigm in the genre. Joy Ride generally plays it safe on that front, but it does champion queer storytelling in more subtle ways.
Deadeye receives the least amount of screen time in comparison to their three fellow leads, but the character, who starts the film using she/her pronouns, packs a punch with every scene they appear in. It’s wonderful to see actor Sabrina Wu, who also uses they/them pronouns, play a lovable character who goes on an emotional journey of their own.
Behind the lens, out actor Cola plays Lolo, a dick-obsessed woman whose passion in life is bringing sex-positivity to the world through questionable art and sculptures. While Cola has played lesbians in Good Trouble (2019–2023) and in Randall Park’s Shortcomings (2023), I loved seeing her stretch different aspects of her sexuality, her character sleeping with men this go-round. Similarly, out actor Hsu plays an ostensibly straight character, Kat. But when queer actors are given the opportunity to dabble in all manner of romantic and sexual pairings on screen, that levels the playing field.
Mediaversity Grade: A+ 5.17/5
Joy Ride feels like a cathartic exhale—a movie where Asian women get to be sexy, horny, and messy, rather than exotified or leered at through a white male gaze. The fact that Lim, Chevapravatdumrong, and Hsiao somehow turned this deeply specific story into a mainstream summer must-watch for people from all walks of life is beyond impressive.
Like Joy Ride? Try these other movies featuring Asian American female leads.
Always Be My Maybe (2019)
Crazy Rich Asians (2018)
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)