The arrival of “Joy Ride” is sort of inevitable in my trivial opinion. After boys had all those raunchy funs in numerous R-rated comedy films such as “Superbad” (2007) and “The Hangover” (2009) during last two decades, girls also went all the way for adult comic materials as shown in a number of recent female comedy films such as “Girls Trip” (2017), and now it is young Asian ladies’ turn for throwing themselves into anything for shock and laugh.

The movie opens with the prologue scene establishing the relationship between it two different Asian female characters: Audrey Sullivan (Ashley Park) and Lolo Chen (Sherry Cola). When young Lolo moved to a suburban neighborhood of Seattle, Washington along with her Chinese immigrant parents, she felt rather isolated because of their race, but, what do you know, there soon came young Audrey, who was incidentally adopted by her Caucasian foster parents a few years ago. Although their first encounter was rather awkward, Audrey and Lolo quickly befriended each other, and the following montage scene shows their developing friendship during next several years.

As your average Asian American overachiever not so different from when I was young and wild for better grades, Aubrey subsequently becomes a promising young lawyer, but Lolo has been relatively less successful as an aspiring artist who wants to pursue more her own artistic vision involved, uh, body positivity. As a matter of fact, she has been lived at Audrey’s residence for several years because she does not have to pay rent, and Audrey does not mind at all as her best female friend.

On one day, Aubrey is assigned to handle a very important business deal in China. Mainly because she cannot speak Mandarin well, Lolo comes to accompany her as her unofficial translator, and Lolo also invites her eccentric cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) to join them later. Aubrey is naturally not so pleased about that, but she is going to join her old college friend Kat (Stephanie Hsu) in Beijing, China anyway, so she does not object to that.

Once these four young ladies gather together, the movie embarks on throwing lots of raunchy comic moments which will often make you cringe while also generating some good laughs. At a fancy nightclub where she meets and then tries to convince a certain Chinese business to accept that deal, Aubrey comes to have a much wilder night than she has ever imagined, and we are served with a couple of amusingly embarrassing moments involved with her body’s rather sensitive response to alcohol.

Meanwhile, for making her friend look good in front of that Chinese businessman, Lolo happens to lie a bit about Aubrey’s biological mother, so Aubrey and her friends start a journey for meeting her biological mother. After all, there is enough information for locating her biological mother who seems to be living somewhere in a local city outside Bejing, and all they will have to do next is going to that city, which is incidentally where many of Lolo and Deadeye’s family members reside.

Of course, their following journey turns out to be much bumpier than they thought. There is a hysterical moment involved with a seemingly nice American girl they happen to encounter on a train, and then there comes a comically sexual sequence involved with a certain real-life American basketball player and several other players in his group, one of whom turns out to have a little past between him and Kat. As a promising actress who has tried to be discreet and exemplar just like Aubrey despite her wild college days, Kat surely becomes nervous to say the least, and that leads to one big hilarious moment to remember.

After it reaches to its highpoint where our young ladies do an impromptu K-POP performance for going to Seoul, South Korea for a reason I will not reveal here, the screenplay by co-producers Cherry Chevapravatdumrongb and Teresa Hsiao, which is based on the story written by them and director/co-producer Adele Lim, comes to lose some of its comic momentum as the mood predictably becomes a bit more serious than before. More conflict among Aubrey and her friends follows as expected, but the movie thankfully does not lose its sense of humor even at this point, and we keep cheering for all of its four main characters as before.

It surely helps that the movie is constantly buoyed by the good comic chemistry among its four main cast members. While Stephanie Hsu, who was recently Oscar-nominated for her superlative breakout turn in “Everything Everywhere All At Once” (2022), is the most prominent one in the bunch, Ashley Park and Sherry Cola steadily hold the center of the film as their contrasting characters pull and push each other throughout the story, non-binary actor Sabrina Wu has their own moments to shine with their straightforward deadpan appearance.

Like “Crazy Rich Asians”, (2018), “Joy Ride” brings some fresh air of racial diversity to its familiar genre territory, and it is also fairly enjoyable thanks to its unabashedly raunchy comic moments which tickled and amused me enough even while I winced a lot for understandable reasons during my viewing. Yes, it is rather refreshing to see Asian female characters boldly and actively going forward for their sexual desire, and I can assure you that the movie will not disappoint you at all in that aspect.