Joy Ride

Directed by Adele Lim, Joy Ride follows four friends, including Sherry Cola’s Lolo and Sabrina Wu’s Deadeye, as they travel to China to look up Audrey’s (Ashley Park) birth mother. First-time filmmaker Lim, armed with a script by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, delivers a hit-and-miss endeavor that ultimately fares best within its far-from-memorable yet basically decent opening half hour, as the movie boasts (and benefits from) a series of affable performances that go a long way towards cultivating a watchable atmosphere – with the likeable cast generally transcending the rather generic and stereotypical bent of their one-dimensional characters (eg there’s the crazy one, the horny one, etc, etc). It’s clear, then, that Joy Ride‘s downfall stems from a midsection that increasingly stresses comedic asides and digressions of a decidedly ill-advised nature (eg the girls encounter a drug dealer on a train, the girls enjoy a wild night of sex with different men, etc), which wreaks havoc on the picture’s tenuous momentum and ensures that the whole thing runs out of steam long before it arrives at its padded-out and eye-rollingly melodramatic third act – with the end result a well-intentioned misfire that feels awfully long even at just 95 minutes.

*1/2 out of ****