Joy Ride

“Joy Ride” is a beautifully made raunchy comedy. 

To decide whether you truly want to see the movie, you have to understand that both sides are equally true. There’s a lot of surprisingly subtle, nuanced stuff here about identity, culture and overcoming internal prejudices, specifically from the perspective of a Chinese American woman. There’s also a ton of sex gags, drug gags, and other seriously R-rated jokes. In “Joy Ride,” you can’t have one without the other. 

The movie starts with two childhood friends, both of whom bond immediately as the only two Chinese-American kids in their white community. Audrey grows up to be an executive while Lolo makes art heavily featuring private parts, but the two end up going to China together to help Audrey land a business deal. When Audrey lies to secure the deal, the two are joined by Lolo’s cousin and Audrey’s college friend on a quest to turn that lie into truth. 

Audrey was adopted by white parents, and the movie takes real time showing her on the complex journey of reconnecting with her Chinese heritage. It also deals with some of the complexities of female friendship, from supporting each other to calling each other out. Friendships can be just as intense as romances, and often last so much longer. 

There’s also an extended gag involving cocaine, every sex joke you can imagine, and a whole bit where they pretend to be a K-pop group. This is “Bridesmaids” and “Girl’s Trip” for Asian-American women, and if you like that sort of thing it’s just as much R-rated fun. The ending feels a bit rushed, like the movie doesn’t know what to do when the jokes go away, but it goes all out until then. 

In some ways, “Joy Ride” is the best of both worlds. You just have to make sure you like both the worlds you’re buying a ticket for.  

Grade: Three stars 

Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken

“Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken” is both an overly simple movie and a strangely complicated one. 

On one level, it distills the essence of the teen movie down to such a basic level that it has almost no identifying features. There are shades of “Princess Diaries” sprinkled throughout, but beyond that the various pieces are so generic as to be indistinguishable. These are the most essential elements of a teen movie, and though they’re executed decently well there’s not even the slightest hint of originality. 

The one move toward uniqueness is to swap the “good” and “bad” species from “The Little Mermaid,” making octopus people the heroes and mermaids the villains. There are other little details that show the movie is a deliberate dig at Disney’s version of the story, which makes it even more surprising that “Ruby” seems fond of the sequel. It borrows several elements from the 2000 direct-to-video sequel, this time without flipping it or doing any kind of tweaking at all. It’s a strange choice for a movie that hates the original so much, and I still don’t understand it. 

It’s the one interesting question in what is otherwise a pleasant but generic movie. 

Grade: Two and a half stars

Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Utah Film Critics Association. Find her on Twitter at @wardellwriter or drop her a line at [email protected].