There’s a palpable anticipation brewing in the crowd. Then the movie starts, and the laughs keep coming, and coming, and coming. You look around, and everyone around you feels the energy of this great thing unfolding in front of you. For the longest time, one of my great joys of the summer movie season was being in a packed theater watching the big comedy coming out. Monetary dynamics have sidelined the big budget R rated comedy from the studios for a long while…until Joy Ride. This is the best studio comedy since Game Night, and hopefully the most memorable one since Bridesmaids that will have people quoting and K poping to Cardi B up and down the aisles.
From the Ants Marching opening credits, we see Audrey (Ashley Park) and Lolo (Sherry Cola) becoming best friends taking down a discriminatory bully on the playground. As they grow up, Audrey becomes a classic overachiever, nearing partner at her law firm, while Lolo is content to make sexually charged art from Audrey’s garage. When the mostly English speaking Audrey gets a chance to become partner by wooing a Chinese executive (Ronny Chieng), she enlists Lolo to act as her translator in a trip to China, the motherland. Getting in the way of the lawyer partner/BFF trip are Lolo’s cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) and Audrey’s college roommate Kat (Stephanie Hsu), a Chinese actress and threat to Lolo for Audrey’s time and best friendship.
In the era of being cancelled and offending others, Joy Ride refreshingly doesn’t give a flying f*ck. I could almost hear the shock in the audience as they very adult humor comes flowing out of our 4 lead women early and often. That early short giggly silence was soon replaced by belly laughs as everyone stopped worrying about looking bad and just having a great time laughing at funny sh*t. Great comedies make you cry with laughter at the big moments and want to grab a drink with the characters in the small ones. Minute one I would have loved to go on a pub crawl with Audrey, Kat, Deadeye and Lolo, as all the actors are having a blast bouncing off of one another delivering funny line after funny line. But everyone is gonna be talking about Adele Lim’s BIG comedy setpieces here, bound to be one of the highlights of my movie year. There’s a sex montage in the middle that’s so rich in specific repressed horny lunacy that it approaches the highs of the Shout montage in Wedding Crashers. That’s just the comedic appetizer though: Joy Ride’s masterpiece happens about an hour in: a perfectly built to moment with an incredible OMG punchline that made me want to stand up and applaud despite being doubled over in comedic ecstasy.
Joy Ride takes the Bridesmaids model and modernizes it further, creating a bridge between the great comedies of the past and hopefully the future. The old storytelling addage was “in comedies you get the girl/guy.” Sex is certainly a part of Audrey, Lolo, and Kat’s lives, but their lives are not so easily pigeon holed into age old tropes about career vs marriage. As a result the third act conflicts are a step above your standard R rated comedy fare, with characters driving the plot instead of the other way around. And not just the central Audrey/Lolo relationship: there are credible Lolo/Kat, Audrey/Deadeye conflicts to resolve as well, and that’s not even counting the subplots. Audrey, Lolo, Kat, and Deadeye are each something culturally representative and wholly unique, something comedies never dare to try let alone pull of so magnificently. Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao’s wonderful characters really make you have no idea how the comedy is going to resolve itself, necessary for the Joy Ride to end in just the right parking space.
Joy Ride dares to be funny, and fearlessly succeeds. The more I think about Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu, Sherry Cola, and Sabrina Wu, my mouth instantly curves into a smile. Maybe I was just so desperate for a great movie comedy I am overpraising what I saw. But I don’t think so. Chicago has built laughter into my DNA, and I haven’t laughed this hard in a long time. Let the Stephanie Hsu era begin!