‘Joy Ride’ is a raunchy comedy with a lot of heart

CEBU, Philippines — It’s disappointing how raunchy comedies don’t feature a lot of women as leads, much less women of color (WOC). The last time an R-rated comedy was headlined by WOC was in 2017 with “Girls Trip” starring Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, Regina Hall, and Tiffany Haddish.

This year, there’s “Joy Ride”, this time with Asian-Americans Ashley Park of “Emily in Paris”, Stephanie Hsu of “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, with Sherry Cola and Sabrina Wu as top billers.

Indeed, the four leads go through some very adult hijinks on their trip to China, like a drug dealer forcing them to consume her smuggled cocaine on a train to avoid inspectors and how they accidentally injure their one-night stands in laugh-out-loud sexual scenes.

But the film also has a sweet heartfelt story. Park’s character Ashley, who is adopted by white parents, decides to look for her birth mother in China with the encouragement of her best friends Kat (Hsu), Lolo (Cola), and Lolo’s cousin Deadeye (Wu) during a business trip where she is tasked to secure a deal with a well-known Chinese businessman (Ronnie Chieng).

“Joy Ride” isn’t really a turn-off-your-brain kind of flick as it explores the identity of being an Asian-American and connecting with your roots. This is a struggle that Ashley has to navigate throughout the film as her travelcmates can speak Chinese fluently while she can’t, and so she has to rely on them when conversing with someone who speaks Mandarin or Cantonese.

It also tackles colonization in a tongue-in-cheek manner as it makes fun of Ashley’s taste in men, music, and food as well as her cluelessness of the Asian community – something that may resonate with some Asians in the diaspora.

The Philippine release of “Joy Ride” was censored despite getting an R-16 rating from MTRCB. A cocaine scene was trimmed and some sexual elements were downplayed. The censorship dampens how raunchy the film truly feels. Thankfully, the emotional aspects were kept intact.

“Joy Ride” deserves a lot more attention for the fact that Asian-American actresses are starring in an R-rated comedy and it has a heartwarming story of what it means to be an Asian woman discovering one’s identity, all done in a humorous and heartfelt way. Four stars out of five. — (FREEMAN)