"Crazy Rich Asians" screenwriter Adele Lim swings for the fences with her directorial debut, "Joy Ride," and knocks it out of the park. Hilariously daring, deeply moving and stereotype-busting in equal measure, it's the raunchiest movie to most likely make you shed a tear.
"Emily in Paris" superstar Ashley Park plays Audrey, who was adopted from China as a baby by white American parents (Annie Mumolo and David Denham). She and her bestie Lolo (Sherry Cola) have been fast friends since the day her parents sought out the only Asian family on the playground, and the odd couple have been a fiercely loyal pair ever since: Audrey the uptight, high-achieving lawyer, Lolo the loutish layabout artist committed to her "body positive" mission statement.
The duo head to China for Audrey's business trip, where she hopes to lock down an important business deal and make partner. Lolo is along for the ride as her Chinese translator and so is Lolo's BTS-obsessed cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu). And they meet up with Audrey's college friend Kat (Stephanie Hsu), now a huge Chinese movie and TV star.
So what can wrong? In the outrageously heightened world of "Joy Ride" — everything.
The women end up on a harrowing journey into rural China to find Audrey's birth mother, tangling with a drug smuggler (Meredith Hagner), romping with a men's basketball team, and posing as a K-pop group along the way (which results in an international scandal). The situations are so ridiculous that one must abandon any notions of real-world rationale in order to simply ride along with the movie's funny and twisted internal logic.
It's remarkable what Lim, and her co-writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, manage to achieve in just 95 minutes, and how they're able to intermingle both the poignant and the prurient, thanks to their cast, which is up for anything and everything.
Hsu, who got an Oscar nod for her role in "Everything Everywhere All at Once" demonstrates her gift for physical comedy, as well as her willingness to embrace every silly shenanigan Lim tosses at her. As Kat, she tries to maintain her prim celebrity image despite the chaos and temptation swirling around her.
Lim explores transnational adoptee identity and the Asian American experience with specificity and humor, but she also doggedly chips away at insidious stereotypes through bawdy body humor, throwing her heroines into transgressive situations in which they must adapt.
