Joy Ride

Sherry Cola is a star.

With her fearless, commanding breakout performance in the hilarious Joy Ride, the actor establishes herself as a talent to watch and someone who should have her the pick of comedy scripts for years to come.

Though Cola’s Lolo is technically the co-lead alongside her childhood best friend Audrey (Ashley Park, Emily in Paris), her consistently magnetic joke delivery and physical humor combine to form a wholly original style that’s a pleasure to experience each time she appears onscreen.

And she’s not alone in the appeal department: each of the four main Chinese-American women in Adele Lim’s feature directorial debut showcase distinct comedic gifts, yet they all blend exceptionally well. Buoyed by relentless jokes from screenwriters Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, Lolo, Audrey, Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), and Kat (Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All at Once) are a delight to behold as they embark on an eventful trip through the motherland that brings them in contact with everything from a drug mule to former NBA All-Star Baron Davis.

A montage of the friends releasing sexual tension with various members of Davis’ basketball team across a hotel is but one of Joy Ride’s many standout scenes that expertly merges the screenwriters’ wit with the cast’s goofy charms. But an impromptu K-Pop performance at a jet hanger is by far the zaniest and most successful, pushing the cast and Lim’s filmmaking to bold new heights.

Along the way, however, the writing team breezes through a few plot points that could use a tad more development. But their biggest sin is succumbing to the cliché of “the big fight” where characters voice years of bottled-up frustrations in a matter of minutes, followed by an inevitable period of reflection and realization, then reconciliation via the most hackneyed means possible: a speech!

But considering this laugh-fest is somehow Chevapravatdumrong’s and Hsiao’s first feature script, it’s borderline amazing that they don’t lean on more crutches. And the ones they do grasp for don’t derail Joy Ride nearly as much as the earnest turns in its recent hard-R, female-centric comedy peer, No Hard Feelings.

Fortunately, this crew only has so much time for schmaltz. They’ve got more important, raunchy things to do.

Grade: B-plus. Rated R. Now playing at AMC River Hills 10, Carolina Cinemark, Grail Moviehouse, and Regal Biltmore Grande.

(Photo: Ed Araquel/Lionsgate)