By John Corrado

★★★ (out of 4)

Joy Ride, the directorial debut of Crazy Rich Asians co-writer Adele Lim, is the story of a Chinese adoptee getting reacquainted with her birth country. It’s also a raunchy, proudly R-rated road trip comedy about four friends having their bonds tested through a series of escapades involving drugs and sex.

Produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg through their Point Grey Pictures banner, the result is a film that is lot of fun and often very funny, with its breakneck pacing and onslaught of laugh-out-loud gags, while also being surprisingly smart and heartfelt in how it explores themes of culture and identity.

The film’s main character, Audrey (Ashley Park), is a young woman who was adopted at birth from China by white parents (David Denman and Annie Mumolo) and raised in Seattle, where she became best friends with Lolo (Sherry Cola), the only other Asian kid in town. Audrey is now an ambitious young lawyer, while Lolo is couch-surfing and trying to make a living selling her sexually explicit, body-positive artwork.

When Audrey has the opportunity to go to China to close a lucrative business deal, the trip offers the chance to finally find her birth mother. Lolo comes along as Audrey’s translator, and brings her socially awkward, K-Pop stan cousin (Sabrina Wu), who has attained the nickname Deadeye, along as well. In China, Audrey also reunites with her old college roommate Kat (Stephanie Hsu), now a big shot actress whose presence causes a jealous rift with Lolo (the eternally online Deadeye doesn’t have many real life friends and is just happy to be included).

If the basic beats of the story are somewhat predictable (this is an ensemble comedy about friendship in a similar vein to The Hangover or Bridesmaids), the screenplay by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao offers a specificity about Asian culture and throws enough comedic curveballs to keep us entertained. As the China trip goes off the rails in a multitude of ways, Lim stages a number of hilarious set-pieces (including one incredible sight gag).

But Lim also nails a tonal shift partway through that allows for a more nuanced backstory, without cutting into the film’s pacing and energy (which isn’t surprising since Crazy Rich Asians pulled off something similar as well). It’s when the film grapples with the realities of someone who was raised in a different culture returning to their birth country, that Joy Ride becomes something a bit deeper and even genuinely touching as well.

The dynamic between the four leads keeps the film fresh and fun, with Park’s Audrey acting as the “straight man” to Cola’s more erratic Lolo. They are complimented by Wu’s perfectly deadpan line deliveries as the queer and autistic-coded Deadeye, and Hsu’s portrayal of a buttoned up movie star having her squeaky clean persona undone. For their chemistry and all that the film gets right, Joy Ride deserves to be a hit comedy.

Joy Ride opens exclusively in theatres on July 7th. It’s being distributed in Canada by Cineplex Pictures.