‘Joy Ride’ Review – Seth Rogen’s Cinematic Abomination Of Desolation

Jacob Smith |

Jul 19, 2023

Sherry Cola as Lolo in Joy Ride (2023), Lionsgate

Taylor Sheridan may be the best screenwriter in Hollywood right now but Seth Rogen is the worst film producer in Hollywood today.

Rogen cannot create a film outside of sex, drugs, and nauseating progressive lectures. If Rogen is producing a film, audiences are guaranteed to be in for an insufferable time (best of luck for you, Ninja Turtles fans).

The last film Rogen produced was 2019’s Good Boys, a movie that sees a group of elementary age kids doing drugs, swearing like adults, and swinging on sex swings to get laughs from Hollywood producers who shouldn’t be around children.

This time, instead of a bunch of minors, we get a group of 30-year-old female Asian burnouts — courtesy of Hollywood’s diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates that have swept the industry into giving jobs to unqualified filmmakers and performers.

Joy Ride is a convoluted story about childhood best friends Audrey (Ashley Park), who was adopted and raised by a white couple and has become a successful woman, and Lolo (Sherry Cola), who was adopted by Asian parents from California and now makes abstract art out of penises for a living.

Audrey takes her burnout best friend to China for a business trip that could lead her firm to get a big deal. They meet up with Kat (Stephanie Hsu) an actress in the Chinese region, and Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) who, albeit not confirmed, is probably non-binary.

The film pretends to have a thinly veiled plot of an Asian woman going to China to meet her birth mother, but the focus is unfiltered degeneracy and progressive soapboxing. Joy Ride is the perfect example of everything that is wrong with Hollywood.

This is a movie that fails on every conceivable metric that we use to judge cinema. Let’s start with the aspect of comedy. Hollywood has struggled to produce quality comedy in the last couple of decades, because in 2023 we live in a society where progressives are constantly trying to redefine what is funny.

A society that tells talented comedians like Dave Chappelle that his jokes are no longer funny, because they don’t target the right groups, will turn around and consume one of the most insultingly unfunny movies of the 21st century — all the while attempting to tell audiences that it’s hilarious because of the race and gender of the people involved in it.

In this movie, the setup of a joke is that a random white kid says something obscenely racist to a young Asian girl and then, in return, the Asian girl attacks the racist kid and the crowd laughs. That’s how the writers believe the joke is supposed to play out.

Hollywood is completely oblivious of the concept of a likeable protagonist, with writers crafting characters based on a person in their inner circle — propping them up to audiences and expecting them to love this person as much as they do.

This arrogant level of self-inserting in storytelling has killed the audience’s ability to invest in a story, because they can’t connect with the characters the film is introducing. The industry believes representation matters more than characters and stories.

The product is only good — in the minds of progressive Hollywood producers — if sex positivity, LGBTQ, feminism, white privilege, and representation are promoted. If a film has an Asian female majority cast that includes members of the LGBTQ community, that flaunt their sexual immorality as empowerment, on that metric, and that metric alone, the film is viewed as successful.

If you’ve seen one Seth Rogen comedy you’ve seen them all. As someone who has grown fond of South Korean cinema over the last several years, this movie is an absolute embarrassment to the Asian community.

Most people from South Korea or China, who happen to watch a film like Joy Ride, would hate Americans because they believe that this is how their people are viewed in the United States. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Joy Ride may very well end up being the worst movie that I’ve seen in the last 10 years.

Seth Rogen as Will in Platonic Episode 2 (2023), Apple TV+ via Official Website

Just when you think that Seth Rogen could not bury the bar any further, he produces a film that manages to take the lowest expectations possible and, somehow, fall even shorter.

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