Joy Ride

Grade: C

I once had a theatre director tell me that if an audience member who just saw your play says to you “you’re a good actor,” you’ve failed – because all they saw was a good actor. What I got from Joy Ride was a quartet of VERY solid physical comedic actresses who work well together and had a great time filming this – and not much more. Credibility, believability, and sometimes even the narrative all come to a screeching halt to make way for the next joke or bit.

Joy Ride shares a title with a film from the fall of 2001 – where Paul Walker, Leelee Sobieski, and Steve Zahn are terrorized by a trucker we mostly only hear, through a CB radio. Ted Levine does the voice. It’s an exciting road-trip action thriller, and is much better than this movie. You wouldn’t confuse them. They have nothing in common other than the name, but if you’ve seen both, it might remind you and make you want to watch the former again. The plot of this current Joy Ride revolves around Audrey (Ashley Park), adopted as a child from China by a white American couple. She’s now in her late 20s, and is given an assignment to travel overseas to land a big MacGuffin…excuse me – account. Through forced expository dialogue, we find out how and why three friends accompany her. They are Lolo (Sherry Cola), Kat (Stephanie Hsu, from Everything Everywhere All at Once), and “Deadeye” (Sabrina Wu). The bombastic, dramatic adventures they get into are like The Hangover and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.

There’s a scene in a nightclub that’s apparently not too noisy or crowded for the music to stop immediately and everyone to simultaneously get quiet the moment one of our main characters vomits on somebody. A running joke is made about one of our heroines, with a wild past, having a devil tattoo. Because of the location, she’s nervous about her Christian fiance seeing it on their wedding night. Not to get crude, but is growing the hair back over it out of the question? After the movie’s climax, which includes a falling-out between the four friends, the last-act reconciliation scene happens in a busy breakfast restaurant, where our lead is allowed to take over the host’s microphone and broadcast her apology for all to hear – including some raunchy one-liner asides on the mic, too. Rather than management nipping that in the bud right away, it’s allowed to continue, so the customers can collectively applaud when it’s over. Can I do one more? At one point, while heavily occupied in a hotel bed with two men, Audrey receives a phone call from her boss, and of course chooses to answer, so that he can drop in unintentional double-entendres appropriate to what’s happening.

I grinned and chuckled throughout the terrific trailer for Joy Ride. I trusted that the material – which looked quite strong – would mesh well with what’s going on narratively. The obvious talent of the performers make it all the more unfortunate every time Joy Ride has a misstep. Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, one of the writers, has worked extensively on Family Guy over the years. On TV, especially on that show, you can get away with random tangential diversions. You almost expect it. Maybe it can work on a feature film, but it certainly doesn’t here.

Grade: C