Joy Ride: A modern kind of gross-out comedy

How can other films compete with luxury blockbusters like Mission: Impossible? One way is to try to tempt audiences with the sort of risqué business Tom Cruise has not dabbled in for years. 

That means lots of swearing, gross-out physical comedy and properly filthy jokes (another useful shortcut: throw in an inadvertent drug trip). While The Hangover franchise stands as this cheerfully disreputable genre’s high watermark – in billion-dollar box office, if not actual quality – there is a long tradition of immodest comedies punching well above their modest budgets. From the bacchanalian Animal House to the hair-raising There’s Something About Mary. 

The new road trip comedy Joy Ride arrives sandwiched in a summer where cinematic raunch seems to be making a concentrated comeback. We have already had No Hard Feelings – a surprisingly sweet sex comedy that also features an enraged Jennifer Lawrence beating up three teens while naked. While the upcoming Strays seems determined to ruin memories of Disney’s The Incredible Journey by putting some very questionable words in the mouths of really cute puppies (Will Ferrell voices a mistreated border terrier who vows to travel cross-country to reunite with his callous owner… and bite his dangly bits off.) 

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Joy Ride is as sex-obsessed as No Hard Feelings and as entertainingly foul-mouthed as Strays. But it comes with a refreshing change of perspective. Audrey (Ashley Park from Netflix’s Emily in Paris) was a Chinese baby adopted by a white American couple in the 1990s. Her Chinese-American friend Lolo (Sherry Cola) helped Audrey navigate growing up as one of only two Asian kids in their appropriately named Seattle suburb of White Hills.

Fast-forward 25 years and the pair are still besties even if their career paths have radically diverged. Audrey is a driven corporate lawyer, while Lolo is a penniless artist creating eye-popping sculptures from sex toys. 

Closing a crucial deal in Beijing could secure Audrey’s promotion in her pale, stale and overwhelmingly male firm. But she has little more than a passing knowledge of her homeland. Lolo tags along on the trip supposedly as translator but with more of an interest in partying. An uptight overachiever paired with a horny slacker is a well-worn comic trope, but Joy Ride augments its central duo with Audrey’s college room-mate Kat (the brilliant Stephanie Hsu, Oscar-nominated for Everything Everywhere All At Once), now a popular actor in China cultivating a virginal image at odds with her promiscuous past, and Lolo’s Chinese cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), a socially awkward K-pop obsessive. 

The Beijing company Audrey is negotiating with is big on family values, so the business trip mutates into a search for her birth mother, which sends the bickering foursome pinballing around China getting into bawdy scrapes along the way.  

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With this flavour of OTT comedy, the fear tends to be: did they burn through all the best bits in the trailer? Certainly sequences where the girls become unwilling drug mules or try to pass themselves off as a K-pop girl group singing Cardi B’s horniest hit have been heavily previewed. But these scenes escalate with such hysterical energy that they still seem audacious in context, while another brilliantly choreographed set-piece – where the girls all look set to get lucky with the sculpted hunks of a Chinese basketball team – bumps and grinds its way to a tremendous punchline. 

These tentpole stunts are stitched together by a script that works hard to inject every exchange with some sort of jab, joke or gag, many at the expense of Audrey, who readily admits that she is so out of touch with her Chinese heritage she may as well be a white middle-class American who watches Succession and listens to Taylor Swift. The sheer pace of all the swearing and salaciousness from the off can be a little overwhelming. But for those prepared to go along with it, Joy Ride ends up in some unexpectedly emotional places. (There is no blooper reel but you may quietly blubber a little.) 

The late swerve into earnestness might not be totally convincing, especially when compared to all the farcical detours en route. But after what these characters have gone through – and the fearlessness of the core cast embracing the often-humiliating chaos – it seems mean-spirited to wish them anything other than a happy ending.

Joy Ride is in cinemas 4 August

Graeme Virtue is a film and TV critic

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