Joy Ride is a 2023 American road trip comedy film that serves as the directorial debut of Adele Lim; it was written by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong (Family Guy, The Orville) and Teresa Hsiao (Family Guy, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens) with a story by Lim, Chevapravatdumrong and Hsiao. The film stars Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu, and Sabrina Wu.
American friends Audrey (Park) and Lolo (Cola) have been inseparable since they were toddlers. When Audrey has an opportunity to go to China for work, she recruits Lolo to be her translator. They are in turn joined on the trip by Audrey's former roommate-turned TV star, Kat (Hsu), and Lolo's awkward cousin, Deadeye (Wu). However, their journey is not a smooth one, and they face many hilarious setbacks along the way.
The film was produced by Point Grey Pictures and distributed by Lionsgate and premiered on March 17, 2023 at that year's South by Southwest film festival, later receiving a theatrical release in the United States on July 7.
Previews: Red Band Trailer 1
, International trailer, Red Band Trailer 2
Not to be confused with the 2001 horror movie starring Paul Walker.
Tropes in this film include
- A Good Name for a Rock Band: There's an in-universe K-pop group called "Howdy Fun." When pretending to be K-pop idols, the group call themselves "Brownie Tuesday."
- Adam Westing: NBA star Baron Davis shows up in the movie as someone who regularly sexts with Lolo.
- Ambiguously Bi: A throwaway line early in the movie implies Lolo might be bisexual, but it never comes up again.
- Ambiguously Gay: While the other girls are admiring Kat's shirtless boyfriend, Deadeye merely yawns. They could possibly be asexual but later reacts very jealously when Bao Bao asks if Audrey is single, snapping "SHE'S MY...friend." And during the skirt-ripped-off scene they're actually quite appreciative, unlike Lolo and Audrey who are freaking out.
- Artistic License – Medicine: The morning after basketball player nookie ends with one being diagnosed with "shattered pelvis" - not only should he be in a wheelchair, but pelvic fractures are potentially fatal due to the major arteries running through there.
- As Himself: Former NBA player Baron Davis, who moved to China to play basketball after his career in America ended, appears in a few scenes as a fictionalized version of himself.
- Ass Shove: When the drug smuggler coerces the group into helping hide her wares, they scramble to try to hide the drug-filled condoms in different parts of their outfits. Kat is desperate enough to shove several condoms up her rectum. Trouble ensues later when she is trying to remove them, and cannot remember how many condoms she shoved up there. Then one of them bursts. Inside.
- Bait-and-Switch Comment: In-Universe. Lolo's parents react to Audrey's White parents' question about them being new to town as a racist microaggression, given her mother's preemptive explanation that they are new to town but not to the country. However, it's assuaged when they reveal that their daughter Audrey is also Asian, and they were just trying to connect her with a potential Asian friend.
- Boomerang Bigot: When Audrey selects a train car, she finds excuses to pass up several occupied by Chinese people until she finds one occupied by a blond woman. Lolo accuses her of being racist against her fellow Asians. It winds up biting them all in the ass when said blond woman turns them into accomplices for her drug smuggling.
- The Cameo: Daniel Dae Kim as the surviving husband of Audrey's birth mother (not the birth father).
- Can't Hold His Liquor: Audrey has trouble keeping up with her Chinese acquaintances in a drinking contest and ends up twice throwing up in embarrassing fashion as a result.
- Celebrity Masquerade: The group has to pose as K-Pop singers in order to get on a plane. Made funnier by the fact that one of them actually is an in-universe celebrity, just not the right kind.
- Chekhov's Skill: Audrey and Kat reminisce about being in an a capella group in college. Their singing skills later come in handy when they have to pose as K-pop stars.
- Childhood Friends: Lolo and Audrey have been besties since their first meeting as kids, even as their differing personalities and eventually lifestyles emerge.
- Compartment Shot: Played for laughs when they show just how much of Kat's devil tattoo actually reaches inside her.
- Covered in Gunge: Drinking with the Chinese businessmen leads to Audrey vomiting all over Deadeye. They are seen getting hosed down by a street cleaner later.
- Creative Closing Credits: The closing credits are illustrated portraits of the characters with clever editing..
- Destructo-Nookie: Baron Davis is not happy to find his players have been injured after having sex with Kat and Audrey.
- Disney Acid Sequence: While impersonating K-pop stars, the gang sings a cover of Cardi B's "WAP", which turns into an actual music video.
- Dull Eyes of Unhappiness: Deadeye has this as their default resting face, hence their nickname.
- Eating the Eye Candy: Several instances of the girls ogling attractive men, with a notable shot of Kat aggressively flexing her legs on a gym machine.
- Embarrassing Tattoo: Audrey makes the mistake of mentioning Kat's to Lolo. She claims it's just a small flower on her inner thigh, but it turns out to be a devil on her vagina, including inside.
- Ethical Slut: Lolo, Kat, and Audrey have all had sex with multiple men in their lives but they are still depicted as decent, sympathetic people.
- Female Gaze: Constantly. This is a relentlessly and unapologetically raunchy movie with several straight (or bi) female leads, and they do a lot of checking out various men they meet.
- Foreign Culture Fetish: Deadeye is obsessed with K-Pop and, by extension, Korean culture.
- Given Name Reveal: Done backwards - Deadeye reveals early on that their "legal name" is Vanessa. Then they never bring it up again.
- Going Commando: Kat apparently forgot about panties when the girls masquerade as K-Pop stars. She pays for it dearly.
- Jizzed in My Pants: Subverted. Clarence almost does it but manages to hold it in. He apparently wears three pairs of underwear just in case.
- Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!: While posing as K-Pop stars and doing a livestreamed dance routine, Kat's skirt is ripped off revealing a giant Devil tattoo on her crotch. She loses her parts in both the TV show and movie she's in. To drive home just how quickly the news has spread, we see glimpses of news reports in Japanese and Tagalog discussing the video.
- Interchangeable Asian Cultures: After the reveal that Audrey is of Korean, not Chinese, descent, the girls have a fight where it's claimed that Lolo and Audrey were only friends because they were the only Chinese girls in town. Lolo bites back that they would have been stuck together anyway because white people can't tell the difference between Chinese and Korean.
- Interracial Adoption Struggles: A major part of Audrey's arc is that she's uncomfortable being one of two Asians in town as well as raised by white parents, so that Asians don't consider her Asian enough while her neighbors and coworkers define her by being Asian. Then it gets compounded when she finds out she's not Chinese but actually of Korean descent, adding another leg on her journey of self-discovery.
- Lady Swears-a-Lot: Lolo. Even as a child in the prologue, she's already dropping F-bombs.
- Last-Second Word Swap: When Bao Bao asks is Audrey is single, Deadeye immediately shouts "She's MY... friend". Audrey doesn't notice because it's in Chinese, but even the subtitles delay the word "friend" to emphasize the pause.
- A Minor Kidroduction: The movie starts with Audrey and Lolo's first meeting as children. We then get a brief montage of them through the years, then the plot kicks in with them in their late 20s.
- New Friend Envy: Lolo, Audrey's childhood best friend, starts the movie deeply disliking Kat, Audrey's very close college roommate. They bond over the course of their adventures together.
- Noodle Incident: At some point in the past, Deadeye did something to Audrey's hair (implied to have involved fire). It never fully grew back and Audrey has to style her hair to cover it up.
- Production Foreshadowing: Audrey's apparently random pick of Splinter as a sex symbol - Seth Rogen produces this movie as well as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.
- Really Gets Around: Kat, up until three years ago. Lolo and Audrey aren't exactly prudes themselves, but still make fun of Kat for it, especially when they find out about the "good girl" image she's cultivated with her new boyfriend.
- "Rediscovering Roots" Trip: Audrey is a Chinese-American adoptee raised by a white family who travels back to China for the first time. She takes it as an opportunity to discover her roots but isn't interested in reconnecting with her birth mother. Ultimately, she discovers that she's Korean and makes a detour to Korea to discover her real roots.
- The Reveal: Late in the movie, Audrey finds out that she isn't actually ethnically Chinese but the illegitimate daughter of a Korean teenager who was sent to China during her pregnancy to spare her family the embarrassment.
- Road Trip Plot: The plot of the film is kicked off by Audrey's law firm assigning her to close a deal with a client in China, which turns into a journey to track down her birth mother, with Lolo, Kat, and Deadeye tagging along for the trip.
- Role-Ending Misdemeanor: In-Universe. Kat is fired from her historical drama after a video of her dancing with no underwear, indecent vaginal tattoo on full display, goes viral.
- Scenery Porn: There's no small amount of this on the last leg of the trip to Haiqing, a particularly rural location.
- Sex Is Evil, and I Am Horny: Kat and her devoutly Christian boyfriend Clarence refuse to have premarital sex but are shown to both have a lot of repressed sexual tension. It's revealed that Clarence isn't as devout as he seems and he only avoided sex because he was intimidated by Kat's experience. After an honest conversation, they do it immediately.
- Ship Tease: Deadeye hints at attraction to Audrey via a Last-Second Word Swap, but it never goes anywhere.
- Shout-Out:
- Masquerading as a K-Pop girl group with two members named Lisa?
- Deadeye is also a huge fan of BTS.
- According to this article, the movie's title is a reference to The Joy Luck Club, which is also about four Chinese-Americans reconnecting with their Chinese roots. In fact, the movie's original title was "Joy Fuck Club".
- One of Lolo's bits of teasing toward Audrey about how "white" she is is that she knows the names of all the main characters on Succession.
- After Lolo says Audrey has never slept with an Asian man, Audrey says she has masturbated to Splinter, of all things.Lolo: He's a rat!
Audrey: He's a good father. - Deadeye comes up with fake names for the girls - Hermione, Ron and Harry. Lolo claims Hagrid.
- Audrey does a Gollum impression to entertain a couple basketball players she meets.
- Some of My Best Friends Are X: Audrey's boss repeatedly insists he's an ally. He threw Audrey a Mulan-themed birthday party and when he fires her for getting high, having sex with several basketball players, and traveling China to find her birth mother, he says he fired a white guy for the same reason.
- Starving Artist: In contrast to her professionally successful best friend Audrey, Lolo is still struggling to make ends meet as an artist. The fact that the piece of art that she is most proud of is a diorama of the playground where she and Audrey met, made entirely of phalluses, probably does not help this.
- Stylistic Suck: The scene of the C-drama Kat and Clarence are seen filming is filled with overacting, amateurish camera work, and obviously fake special effects, like comical blood splatter.
- A Threesome Is Hot: Audrey has a sexy threesome with two hunky members of the basketball team, who are a little too experienced at double teaming the same woman. Subverted for laughs, as it ends with both men getting concussions while eating her out at the same time.
- Translator Buddy: The Indian basketball player hitting on Audrey only speaks Chinese and Hindi, so he needs his Chinese-Australian teammate to translate for him. This is how Audrey ends up in a threesome.
- Typecasting: Early on, In-Universe actress Kat notes that she's on the way to being typecast as a good girl. The infamous viral video of her vaginal tattoo presumably puts a stop to this, and at the end she's booked a 'serious' Hollywood gig in a Greta Gerwig movie.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Audrey onto Chao after drinking copious amounts of alcohol (including a shot with a century egg that she's never eaten before. Later subverted when she vomits again over a railing and a later shot shows it was right onto Deadeye.
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: At the end, the group reunites and talk about what they've been up to over the last year:
- Audrey has started her new law practice.
- Lolo's art is now being displayed in a gallery.
- Kat has gotten a role in a movie with Greta Gerwig and is engaged to Clarence.
- Deadeye hosts regular board game nights and has a light-up pussy tattoo.
- The Whitest Black Guy: Despite being ethnically Chinese, Audrey is repeatedly told by Asians that she's not "Asian enough" due to being raised by a white family. She's not particularly interested in her heritage or her birth family at the beginning of the film but learns to appreciate Chinese culture as well as a little bit of Korean culture by the end of the film.
