Joy Ride                4 stars

Here’s an idea I haven’t seen before in a movie. A sex comedy road trip starring primarily young Asian women. (The sex comedy movie genre is now referred to as raunch-com in the industry.) In Joy Ride, written by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao and directed by Adele Lim (writer for Crazy Rich Asians), we first meet best friends Audrey (Ashley Park making a transition from a successful career on Broadway and starring in TV’s Emily in Paris) and Lolo (Sherry Cola) as 5-year-olds on a playground when Lolo punches out a bully who calls the Asian girls an ethnic slur. Audrey was adopted from China by white parents while Lolo is a recent Chinese immigrant with her parents. As adults, Audrey is a lawyer in a law firm and has the opportunity to go to China to land a big client. Lolo is successful as an artist making sexually graphic art pieces. Lolo volunteers to travel with Audrey as a translator as Audrey is not fluent in Chinese, but she is bringing her odd cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) with them. Deadeye has a very odd personality and is nonbinary and is an obsessed K-Pop fan. Once in China the trio meet up with Kat (Stephanie Hsu, nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in last year’s sensation Everything, Everywhere, All at Once), Audrey’s college friend who now stars in a popular Chinese soap opera along with her fiancé (who is unaware of Kat’s long sexual history). Once together in China, Lolo convinces Audrey through some trickery that they should track down Audrey’s birth mother in China, who gave her up for adoption when she was a teenager. Having established the premise, the joy ride begins as this quartet of twenty something’s journey through Beijing and rural China, encountering a drug dealer, a professional basketball team and Lolo’s extended family. The trip, of course, includes plenty of references to various sex acts and anatomy, both female and male, as well as some on screen action requiring gymnastic talent, like The Devil’s Triangle (Don’t ask). They even try to impersonate a popular K-Pop group to gain certain favors from the authorities. (How could that go wrong?) (And there is a performance of Cardi B’s WAP that will get your attention.) Naturally, the movie goes for extreme gross-out scenes to get “I can’t believe they did that” reactions from the audience. But it all serves to show how close friends will always come back to support each other even though they have differences that sometimes drive them apart. Fans of the raunch-com movies should all enjoy the movie. I missed it in theaters and finally found it online. Some viewers will recognize Meredith Hagner as a female drug dealer. (Hagner was a regular on the comedy Search Party and is married to Wyatt Russell, son of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell!)