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Joy Ride is essentially The Hangover but with Chinese women. This is an interesting angle but The Hangover was a tiresome series of films where a group of amoral and cliched characters; the cool one, the insecure one, the socially awkward one and the kind of normal one, got themselves into a number of spiralling contrived situations, each of which saw them make poor decisions with life altering consequences, all the while making pseudo edgy jokes about sex, drugs and body parts. The question is, is it enough just to gender and culture flip this or is what we’ve got here just another painful comedy that dresses arrested development up as independent spirit while insisting that true friendship only comes after mutual self destruction?

The answer is yes, it works better. Joy Ride is a little laboured and predictable in its plotting but the main problem with The Hangover films was the distastefully unapologetic display of rampant masculinity and the legitimisation of obnoxious, self centred behaviours (director Todd Phillips went on to make Joker, so he was just warming up). Joy Ride has none of this and as a result is a cheeky but endearing comedy, filled with stereotypically flawed but endearing people. The movie finds its humour in sex positivity, cocaine use, human orifices, accidental injury (but crucially not violence) and bigotry but is never disrespectful or offensive. Also, similar to Jennifer Lawrence’s marginally problematic sex comedy No Hard Feelings, it also manages to be quite touching in places.

The cast are all strong too. Stephanie Hsu doesn’t get to shine as she did in her Oscar nominated performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once, or indeed with her appearance in The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel, but she confirms her status as a compelling screen presence. Ashley Park ably holds the movie together as the ostensible lead, Sherry Cola has a real Awkwafina energy but still manages to do her own thing, and Sabrina Wu mixes laughs and pathos in a way her Hangover comparison player Zach Galifianakis has never managed. Hsu may not have won the gong she was up for in March but a Malaysian woman did and it is great that following the recent award recognition of people like Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Youn Yuh-jung, Chloé Zhao and Bong Joon Ho, that all of the women here are set to join others like Steven Yeun, Ali Wong, Justin H. Min, Simu Liu, Song Kang-ho, John Cho, Manny Jacinto, Randall Park, Jessica Henwick, Ming-Na Wen, Henry Golding, Priyanka Chopra, Auli’i Cravalho, Riz Ahmed and of course Awkwafina as Asian actors who, if not all household names, are becoming increasingly recognisable in mainstream cinema and TV. Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee and Dwayne Johnson are outliers no more.

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The Ripley Factor:

Joy Ride is not the first film to put women together in a comedy of this type, Rough Night, Girls Trip and Bridesmaids all did the same with mixed results but even without the broader representation brought by the cast this feels like a step forward. This movie is rude in a way those others weren’t and whether that tests your sensibilities or not, this move things forward. I started this piece with a heavy comparison with one particular trilogy of edgy movies but while The Hangover became especially toxic, they are not alone in showing misogynistic attitudes. American Pie, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Road Trip, and going back Revenge of the Nerds, Porky’s and Animal House, all have this to varying degrees and it is good to have a movie that does this without doing that.