joy ride movie review nytimes

True to its title, Emer Reynolds' "Joyride" holds both the thrills of getting away with something and the emotional crash that follows a burst of adrenaline—a mood killjoy, if you will. Fortunately, it's in this sweet-hearted movie's favor that the highs are stronger and more enjoyable than the lows. It may not come together as smoothly as the best feel-good movies of its kind, but there's an unwieldy charm to "Joyride" that makes the trip memorable.

At a cancer memorial fundraiser for his mom, 13-year-old Mully ( Charlie Reid ) catches his dad James ( Lochlann O'Mearáin ) stealing donations. It's for the family, he insists, but Mully isn't convinced. He snatches the wad of bills and takes off, jumping into a cab and driving away with it. Until that is, there's a snore from the backseat and then a baby's cry. He unintentionally picked up Joy ( Olivia Colman ), an uptight solicitor on her way to give her new baby away to her sister. Both on the run from painful memories, hurtful parental figures, and at some point, local authorities, Mully and Joy make unlikely travel companions as they sort themselves out.

Reynolds, an experienced editor-turned-director, and writer Ailbhe Keogan thread a thin line between the pair's heartbreaking confessions and the various bumps on the road. Some detours are funny, some are somber, and a few are a bit off-kilter, like a street parade where people in intimidating burlap costumes dance around Mully at a delayed, dreamy speed. He's not dreaming, nor under the influence; it's just a surreal moment, complete with an oversized babydoll head being carried in the street. It's a bit on-the-nose overall, but not as much as a contrived moment on a plane when Joy is trying to leave, and the passengers rally around her like in a classic romantic comedy. Unfortunately, some of these stranger moments between heartfelt scenes throw off the tone and feel like ideas imported from another movie.

However, other visual qualities of Reynolds' "Joyride" are more holistic. Her collaboration with cinematographer James Mather creates a vivid sense of the Irish countryside and seaside. The film keeps gorgeous details of a foggy day as the characters walk among endless green hills and stalks of barley bouncing in the wind. As they wait to take the ferry, the blueness of the water seems to leap off the screen. The sun enters a window with a lovely glow in a boarding house's kitchen. Even if an emotional scene may be tough to watch, their images are usually eye-catching.

The heart and soul of "Joyride" are the two mismatched travelers brought to life by Reid and Colman's performances. Although plenty world-weary after landing with his self-absorbed father, Mully still has childlike moments of rebellion and innocence. In one tender moment at a gas station, he plays with a musical, dancing toy, and he mimics its moves. Joy watches from afar while holding her baby and smiles as if both taking in the silly moment and perhaps thinking of her own baby's future playtime. In a sense, she is haunted by her mother's lifelong antipathy and is afraid she will similarly fail this child she doesn't want. Colman's body language here is not too dissimilar to Charlie Chaplin's the Tramp in " The Kid ," acting as if almost physically allergic to holding a baby, let alone keeping it. Absent a maternal figure like Mully's, Joy sometimes relies on Mully for caretaking advice since he has experience watching over younger relatives. They are both grieving their lost mothers and learning to step up for the sake of others.

The shared bond between Mully and Joy keeps "Joyride" together, with their tug-of-war over the steering wheel building trust between the two. They are both determined to move forward but must deal with their not-too-distant past, and they learn they can rely on each other when other parental figures have failed them. "Joyride" may be tame in some respects, but it's a gentle movie about forgiveness, love, and learning to cope with unplanned disruptions in someone's life.

Now playing in theaters and available on VOD.

Monica Castillo

Monica Castillo is a critic, journalist, programmer, and curator based in New York City. She is the Senior Film Programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center and a contributor to RogerEbert.com .

Olivia Colman as Joy
Charlie Reid as Mully
Lochlann O'Mearáin as James
Olwen Fouéré as Sideline Sue
Florence Adebambo as Catherine
Tommy Tiernan as Ferryman
Alibhe Keogan
Emer Reynolds

Cinematographer

James Mather
Tony Cranstoun

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Buckle up: This mile-a-minute 'Joy Ride' across China is a raunchy romp

Justin Chang

Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), left, Audrey (Ashley Park), Lolo (Sherry Cola) and Kat (Stephanie Hsu) in Joy Ride. Ed Araquel/Lionsgate hide caption

Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), left, Audrey (Ashley Park), Lolo (Sherry Cola) and Kat (Stephanie Hsu) in Joy Ride.

There's an early moment in Joy Ride when you'll know if you're on board with this exuberantly raunchy comedy or not. On a neighborhood playground, a white kid tells a young Chinese American girl named Lolo that the place is off-limits to "ching chongs."

Lolo then does something that maybe a lot of us who've been on the receiving end of racist bullying have fantasized about doing: She drops an F-bomb and punches him in the face. It's an extreme response, but also a hilarious and, frankly, cathartic one — a blissfully efficient counter to every stereotype of the shy, docile Asian kid.

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Lolo soon becomes best friends with Audrey, one of the only other Asian American girls in their Washington state suburb. That aside, the two could hardly be more different: Where Lolo is unapologetically crude and outspoken, Audrey is quiet and eager-to-please. And while Lolo speaks Mandarin fluently and grew up steeped in Chinese culture, Audrey is more westernized, having been adopted as a baby in China and raised by white parents.

Years later, they're still best friends and total opposites: Audrey, played by Ashley Park, is a lawyer on the fast track to making partner at her firm, while Lolo, played by Sherry Cola, is a broke artist who makes sexually explicit sculptures.

The story gets going when Audrey is sent on a business trip to Beijing to woo a potential client. Lolo comes along for fun, and to serve as Audrey's translator. Lolo also brings along her K-pop-obsessed cousin, nicknamed Deadeye, who's played by the non-binary actor Sabrina Wu.

The script, written by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, is heavy on contrivance: Thanks to Lolo's meddling, Audrey winds up putting her work on hold and trying to track down her birth mother. But the director Adele Lim keeps the twists and the laughs coming so swiftly that it's hard not to get swept up in the adventure.

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The comedy kicks up a notch once Audrey looks up her old college pal Kat, who's now a successful actor on a Chinese soap opera. Kat is played by Stephanie Hsu , who, after her melancholy breakout performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once , gets to show off some dazzling comedic chops here .

Like Lolo, with whom she initially butts heads, Kat has had a lot of sex, something she's trying to hide from her strictly Christian fiancé. But no one in Joy Ride holds onto their secrets, or their inhibitions, for very long. As they make their way through the scenic countryside, Audrey, Lolo, Kat and Deadeye run afoul of a drug dealer, hook up with some hunky Chinese basketball players and disguise themselves as a fledgling K-pop group for reasons too outlandish to get into here.

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In a way, Joy Ride — which counts Seth Rogen as one its producers — marks the latest step in a logical progression for the mainstream Hollywood comedy. If Bridesmaids and Girls Trip set out to prove that women could be as gleefully gross as, say, the men in The Hangover movies, this one is clearly bent on doing the same for Asian American women and non-binary characters.

Like many of those earlier models, Joy Ride boasts mile-a-minute pop-culture references, filthy one-liners and a few priceless sight gags, including some strategic full-frontal nudity. Naturally, it also forces Audrey and Lolo to confront their differences in ways that put their friendship to the test.

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If it doesn't all work, the hit-to-miss ratio is still impressively high. Joy Ride may be reworking a formula, but it does so with disarming energy and verve, plus a level of savvy about Asian culture that we still rarely see in Hollywood movies. Director Lim can stage a gross-out moment or a frisky montage as well as anyone. But she also gives the comedy a subversive edge, whether she's pushing back on lazy assumptions about Asian masculinity or — in one queasily funny scene — making clear just how racist Asians can be toward other Asians.

The actors are terrific. Deadeye is named Deadeye for their seeming lack of expression, but Wu makes this character, in some ways, the emotional glue that holds the group together. You can hear Cola's past stand-up experience in just about every one of Lolo's foul-mouthed zingers. And Park gives the movie's trickiest performance as Audrey, an insecure overachiever who, as the movie progresses, learns a lot about herself. Maybe that's a cliché, too, but Joy Ride gives it just the punch it needs.

Review: The exuberantly rude ‘Joy Ride’ gives its stars the raunch-pad they deserve

Four women stand on a roadside, stranded

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A good gross-out gag is hardly a novelty in mainstream comedies, but there’s one in “Joy Ride” that made my stomach almost — almost — flip in solidarity. It happens in a Beijing nightclub where Audrey (Ashley Park), an American lawyer wooing a potential client (Ronny Chieng), is invited, or rather pressured, to enjoy a well-known local delicacy with a slurpable twist. “Are thousand-year-old-egg cocktails really a thing?” I wondered in ignorance and horror, thinking of all the dark, gelatinous egg chunks I’d left in my own congee bowls as a kid, despite my parents’ insistence that I should eat them and like them. Would a shot of liquor have made them more palatable? I don’t know; I’ll never know. But in that moment, Audrey’s revulsion, to say nothing of her bad-Asian guilt, were very much my own.

You might guess some of what happens next. Audrey projectile-vomits all over the client-to-be, enduring the kind of squirmy ritual humiliation that awaits many an insecure, tightly wound comedy protagonist. But “Joy Ride,” an amusingly rude and high-spirited romp from the debuting director Adele Lim (a co-writer on “Crazy Rich Asians” ), has a way of turning predictable story beats into spiky, revealing cultural distinctions.

You’ve seen a lot of strait-laced overachievers learn to lighten up and cut loose on-screen. You’ve seen fewer like Audrey, who was adopted in China and raised in America by white parents, and who’s now visiting her birth country for the first time with friends who are more laid-back, in part, because they’re better versed in the culture and language than she is. (“I’m just a garbage American who only speaks English,” Audrey admits in a moment of drunken confession.) And so the group dynamics are rooted in the usual differences of temperament and personality, yes, but also in nuances of personal upbringing and diasporic experience. This journey really does take Audrey on a journey.

The closest of her traveling companions is Lolo (Sherry Cola), her best pal since they first met as kids in a predominantly white Washington state suburb. A disarmingly funny childhood prologue — there’s a racist slur, a choice expletive and some swift, brutal playground fisticuffs — establishes the characters and their inseparably complementary dynamic. Lolo is the brassy, foul-mouthed, uninhibited one; she grows up to be an artist specializing in sexually explicit sculptures, many of which riff cleverly on the Chinese culture she knows intimately well. The more responsible Audrey, always eager to please and to prove herself, is an attorney in the fast lane, a lone Asian American female powerhouse surrounded by white men in suits (including Timothy Simons as her boss, serving up a sly caricature of performative allyship).

Lolo strengthens Audrey’s pluck and confidence; Audrey gives Lolo encouragement and a roof over her head. And so it’s unsurprising, if ill-advised, when Audrey brings Lolo along as her personal translator on a high-stakes overseas business trip. It’s also the kind of easy-to-swallow, conveniently friendship-testing contrivance that abounds in Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao’s script, including Audrey’s decision to spend her high-stakes overseas business trip searching for her long-lost birth mother. Tagging along for the ride is Lolo’s non-binary cousin (Sabrina Wu), a K-pop obsessive who’s nicknamed Deadeye for their combination of affectless stares and goofy grins. And then there’s Audrey’s old college pal Kat ( Stephanie Hsu ), an actor with a popular Chinese soap-opera gig and a super-Christian fiancé (Desmond Chiam) from whom she’s trying to hide her long list of past sexual partners.

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Hsu received an Oscar nomination earlier this year for her melancholy supporting turn in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a role that only moderately prepares you for her welcome display of randy comic gusto and killer timing here. She and Cola supply much of the story’s comic energy early on, some of it predicated on Kat and Lolo’s mutual loathing and some of it on their raging libidos. The raucousness proves infectious as Audrey, Lolo, Kat and Deadeye embark on a wild trek through the Chinese countryside, becoming reluctant mules for a drug dealer (Meredith Hagner) one minute, and hooking up with some hunky professional athletes the next.

Along the way, Audrey’s most shortsighted assumptions — the way she shies away from the locals she can’t understand and gravitates toward the white English speakers she occasionally encounters — are productively and amusingly upended. Lim and her writers have a knack for casual subversion, whether they’re flooding the screen with ripped Asian male torsos or staging a bubble-gum-hued K-pop-style Cardi B cover. Or, in a moment that will cause heads in every theater to nod in unison, suggesting that few people are more racist, in the end, than Asians are toward other Asians.

Beneath all the sexual-scatological shenanigans, the cocaine enemas and the cunnilingual injuries, there’s a familiar, even dutiful representational strategy at play. If comedies like “Bridesmaids” and “Girls Trip” were lauded, justly if somewhat reductively, for suggesting that women (white and Black, respectively) could be as funny and hard-R raunchy as their slovenly white-male counterparts in, say, “The Hangover” movies, “Joy Ride” means to accomplish something similarly liberating for Asian American female and gender-nonconforming characters everywhere. It also means to tear away the stereotypical veil of docility and propriety in which such characters have too often been presented, to the extent that they’ve been presented at all.

None of which, however well-intended, makes the movie a success by default. To love rude, regressive humor is to know there’s a danger in reducing it to a crude competitive sport or, worse, a declaration of intent. But while “Joy Ride” has its borderline-mechanical moments — a vigorous sex-a-thon montage is both amusing and overly calculated — it moves too swiftly and good-humoredly, for the most part, to fall into this trap for long. It also has actors who, even when cleaving to their characters’ broadest outlines or going for obvious, outlandish laughs, simply possess too much warmth and emotional vibrancy to ever seem one-note.

The joy of “Joy Ride” is certainly there in the sexual repartee, the caustic insults and the foul-mouthed zingers, all of which Lim paces with nary-a-wasted-moment velocity. But it’s also there in the warmly inviting smile that steals across Cola’s face as her Lolo talks about sex as a universal ideal, a source of affirmation rather than shame. Or the way Wu’s face lights up when Deadeye talks about why they like K-pop so much, since it’s the rare thing that actually likes them back. Park, in some ways, gives the trickiest performance as Audrey, the straight woman here in every sense: She has to singlehandedly carry “Joy Ride” through its inevitable, conventional tonal shift from sassy to sentimental, from fallout to reconciliation. She’s egg-ceptional.

'Joy Ride'

Rating: R, for strong and crude sexual content, language throughout, drug content and brief graphic nudity Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes Playing: Starts July 7 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.