Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

The surprising irony of Joy Ride is that it’s when it gets earnest that it actually works best. There are moments of seriousness, and even more moments of genuine sweetness, that really land, and endear us to every one of the four lead characters, who are on a road trip in China.

It’s in the comedy that Joy Ride falters, about half the time. The gags are spotty at best, with punchlines landing effectively maybe half the time. The writers, comprised of a team of three, seem to have taken a kitchen-sink approach, throwing in seemingly every idea they’ve got, without a lot of honing. The result is a comedic mixed bag. This means there actually are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, and if you’re willing to just roll with it all, you’ll have a good time. But, because of the rapid-fire nature of the comedy, plenty of it also falls flat. At least there’s never enough time spent to linger on the flatness, as we quickly move on to the next attempt.

I never want to say this about a movie, but I actually feel like Joy Ride could have benefited from some focus groups. On the other hand, how the hell they could find a representative sample of who they think is this movie’s target audience, I have no idea.

Part of it is the marketing, which bills this movie as a “raunchy comedy”—which, to be fair, it is. But, the trailers really don’t indicate that there’s a lot more to it than that. What’s more, Joy Ride actually avoids the pitfalls of countless “raunchy comedies” from the early 2000s, which persisted in revealing a supposedly wholesome core, which always felt disingenuous. Nothing about Joy Ride feels disingenuous, even though a lot of it is pretty contrived. No one is learning any lessons that feel shoehorned in from a totally different tone of a movie.

These characters grow and develop, rather than learning lessons, per se. And the best thing about them is the actors who play them: Ashley Park as Audrey, an Asian girl adopted by White parents; Sherry Cola as Lolo, Audrey’s very sexually liberated best friend since childhood; Stephanie Hsu as Kat, Audrey’s roommate from college; and Sabrina Wu as Deadeye, Lolo’s socially awkward cousin. When lifelong overachiever Audrey is sent on a business trip to China to close the deal, Lolo tags along as her ostensible interpreter; Deadeye tags along as a hanger-on; and they meet up with working Chinese actress Kat while there, even though Lolo and Kat don’t get along (for now).

The plot gets a little more convoluted as it goes along, with Audrey only finally being convinced to track down her birth mother as a means of impressing the guy with whom she’s meant to close a business deal (played by Malaysian comedian Ronny Chieng). The foursome of delightfully brassy young women travel by plane, by bus, by train and by boat, from Seattle to Beijing to rural China to Seoul, South Korea—all of which are represented by location shots in and around Vancouver, B.C.

There’s a fair amount of sex along the way. Plenty of genuinely hot men come and go in smaller parts. The core cast of four have real chemistry with each other, and Joy Ride has a refreshing amount of diverse representation in it—both across the Asian nationalities and across sexuality and gender lines. By the end of the film, Deadeye is being referred to casually with they/them pronouns, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that get worked into a film’s narratively so subtly and organically.

All of which is to say, there is a lot to like and enjoy about Joy Ride. It’s just that the comedy isn’t always one of them, which is a bit unfortunate given that the comedy is supposed to be the reason to see it. In other words: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll occasionally think it’s a bit lame. I wanted, and kind of expected, a laugh-a-minute riot. I’ll settle for what I got, which was a good laugh every ten or fifteen minutes, with some sweet connections between friends in a silly movie.

*Filthy minds and golden hearts: the foursome of* JOY RIDE.

Overall: B