“Are you Chinese?” Mary Sullivan asked cautiously in a crowded neighborhood park.
The Chens have been asked this question before, usually by folks who assumed they can’t speak English and who had some unkind remarks about immigration.
But the Sullivans were different. They genuinely wanted to know because they had just adopted their daughter, Audrey, from China. And since the Chens (who were, in fact, Chinese) had a young daughter of their own, the Sullivans hoped that having a friend who looked like Audrey would help her to adjust.
Well, it worked, Audrey and Lolo Chen became fast friends. From that first day in the park well into adulthood, the girls stood by each other, fending off bullies, navigating racial biases and encouraging each other in their respective career paths.
But lately, Audrey’s been growing tired of Lolo’s constant presence. It’s not that she wants Lolo to leave her alone. But it’d be nice if Lolo could at least get a real job and move out of her garage.
What’s more, Audrey has been offered a really big promotion—one that would require her to relocate to Los Angeles.
Audrey doesn’t have the courage to tell Lolo that she’ll be leaving, especially since she still needs Lolo’s help. In order to secure her promotion, Audrey has to take a business trip to China. And since Audrey doesn’t speak a lick of the language, she’s recruited Lolo to act as her translator.
They don’t know it yet, but this is about to becomes the adventure of a lifetime.
Audrey and Lolo team up with Deadeye (Lolo’s K-pop obsessed cousin) and Kat (Audrey’s best friend from college who stars in a popular Chinese TV show). Though the women have their differences—they all find Deadeye weird, and Kat and Lolo are jealous of each other—they form a tight bond. Even when they’re angry with one another other, they still demonstrate their love and support. They apologize when they’re wrong and forgive each other. And these actions forge deep friendships.
Audrey and the rest of the girls have faced racial abuse their entire lives (and we see examples of this throughout the film). However, their friendships help them to push through these prejudices to lead successful lives.
[Spoiler Warning] Audrey learns that her birth mother (who passed away from an illness a few years before) had always hoped to meet her. The woman recorded a video expressing her love for her daughter and ensuring Audrey that she never wanted to let her go via adoption but that circumstances had forced her to.
Kat’s boyfriend, Clarence, is a Christian. Kat lies and says that she’s also a Christian. We hear many unkind jokes about this situation throughout the film. Clarence’s voicemail reminds callers, “Jesus loves you.” There’s mention of a Buddhist temple. We learn a woman has a tattoo of the devil.
Joy Ride is rated R, but a lot of the content we see here definitely borders on an NC-17 rating. Throughout the film, we hear almost constant crudities regarding sex, masturbation, sexual orientation and male and female anatomy.
We also see so much of this content onscreen. From graphic sex scenes to full frontal female nudity, nothing, apparently, is off the table. Characters engage in sex with multiple partners; drugs are smuggled in sensitive body cavities; Lolo creates pornographic art; and we’re shown a closeup of a tattoo on (and inside) a woman’s vagina.
During sex scenes (which leave almost nothing to the imagination), we see multiple characters in the buff. A woman’s bare rear is visible after her skirt is accidentally torn off. Couples kiss and grope each other. Characters wear tight and revealing outfits. Several female characters dance to the raunchy Cardi B song “WAP.” Shirtless male characters are ogled by women. Someone references how men and women bathed together in Roman times.
Because Clarence is a Christian, he and Kat agree not to have sex before marriage, much to Kat’s chagrin. Kat’s friends tease her about this, but there are other problems, too. Kat constantly tries to convince Clarence not to wait, often by kissing and groping him in such a way that he’s forced to remind her to “leave room for Jesus.” She lies to him about her sexual past (though he eventually learns the truth on his own). And when she’s unable to curb her desires, she engages with an ex-boyfriend in a grotesque form of masturbation.
After Kat confesses her lies to Clarence, he admits that he insists on a “God gap” because he doesn’t think he can control his own urges. And it’s implied the pair have premarital sex.
We learn that a second character gets a suggestive tattoo, though we don’t see it onscreen. We hear a reference to “mail order brides.” An elderly woman admits she had premarital sex and then married a different man. Someone says, “sex work is real work” after a woman is mistaken for a prostitute. A drug causes a woman to act amorously.
Audrey and her friends learn that many Korean families used to send their pregnant teenage daughters to China to have their babies in secret. (And they learn that the father of one of these illegitimate infants denied having sex with the mother.)
Deadeye, who dresses in a masculine manner and is criticized by her grandmother for not appearing more feminine, starts using nonbinary gender pronouns in the film’s final scene. A male character dresses and acts effeminately. We hear someone solicits sex to men and women online. We hear that a man married a pillow.
Four athletes are seriously injured after a night of sexual escapades. Two were headbutted, one injured his groin after attempting the splits and the fourth shattered his pelvis.
A woman breaks the neck of a chicken. While filming, an actor uses a fake sword and blood to “kill” himself. People slap each other across the face violently during a game. (One man receives a bloody nose while doing this.) A young girl punches a boy on the playground after he uses a racial slur. The boy is then accidentally kicked over by another girl on a swing.
We hear about 75 uses of the f-word alone in this film. Pair that with about 20 uses of the s-word and a handful each of “a–,” “a–hole,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “d–k,” “h—,” “p—y” and “t-tty” and the total number of profanities hits just under 200. And that includes 16 abuses of God’s name (one paired with “d–n”) and a singular abuse of Christ’s name.
Drugs and alcohol play a shamefully significant role in this film.
In one scene, Audrey and her friends drink heavily in order to impress a Chinese businessman. As a result, Audrey gets drunk and vomits on the guy.
In another scene, the women are forced to use and hide a drug dealer’s stash of cocaine and molly. Again, the results aren’t pretty. Deadeye panics as she claims she isn’t ready to “have sex” by putting packets of drugs in her bodily cavities. And Kat struggles to remove the drugs from her own body later on, causing instant intoxication when one of the packets bursts.
Characters drink in several other scenes (sometimes to excess). They also talk about doing more drugs, though they never do. And a child sneaks some booze during a family function.
As I mentioned earlier, there are many examples of racism present in this film. Some of these examples are intended to demonstrate the real, problematic nature of racial prejudice. But the vast majority of these moments are played for humor (though some audiences may still find said humor more hurtful than amusing).
That said, Audrey is particularly wounded by racially charged comments. Like Lolo, she was the target of many insults for her race growing up. However, unlike Lolo, she didn’t have the support of the Asian community behind her. Because her parents were white, Audrey didn’t know any Asian languages or their cultures. And even Lolo tells her on multiple occasions that she’s “basically white.” (Ironically, Audrey is also guilty of acting racist.)
Moreover, Audrey feels even more ostracized because of her adoption. Growing up, her classmates asked offensive questions about her birth family and even implied that she must have done something wrong to make them not want her. And these things wear on Audrey in ways she can’t fully express.
Characters lie throughout the film. A drug dealer lies to police, saying that Audrey and her friends brought drugs onto a train. They’re kicked off the train, and that same woman steals their bags as well. Theft and deception are intertwined elsewhere, too.
As mentioned above, inebriation leads to violent vomiting on other people. A woman uses a water hose to pretend she is a man urinating.
If Joy Ride had stuck to its key message—overcoming racial prejudice and the journey a woman takes to discover her true heritage—it could have been a nice little film. Sadly, the creators had a hard time focusing on what matters. And there’s not much nice here at all.
Joy Ride is vulgar. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve seen a cruder film in my time working at Plugged In. First, there are nearly 200 profanities, most of which are the f-word. Then there’s the nonstop sexual content. And I say nonstop because rarely a scene passes where someone isn’t talking about sex or using a crude reference to female anatomy. Not to mention the stuff we see onscreen, which includes a montage of characters engaging in sexual activities and a close up of a woman’s exposed privates.
And if that wasn’t enough, there are the obnoxious drinking and drug use scenes. At one point, a drug dealer blows cocaine on the gals and tells them if they don’t help hide the drugs (either by using them or concealing them on—or in—their person) she’ll tell the cops the drugs are theirs. In another scene, someone violently vomits onto two separate people after drinking way too much.
When those are the main moments of your film, they drown out any nice messages you perhaps intended to convey about belonging.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
