Joy Ride director laughs off viral criticism that movie is anti-white people and men

Sometimes a piece of criticism can transcend form and become immortalized as its own piece of art. If you’re a critic, you hope it’s because you’ve tapped into something true and universal about a piece of media. Unfortunately, and especially in the digital age, more often a piece of criticism will transcend because a lot of people are dunking on it. So it goes with Lights, Camera, Jackson’s Twitter review of Joy Ride, which director Adele Lim, for one, definitely wants immortalized.

“#JoyRide is embarrassing. Incredibly unpleasant,” Jackson Murphy wrote on Twitter. “Like most modern adult ‘comedies’ it’s raunchy simply to be raunchy, forgetting there has to be humor attached, and there’s none of that. Objectifies men, targets white people. All shock value, ‘look at me’ attitude.”

Lim didn’t have a problem with this scathing review. She retweeted it on her own page with the comment, “Imma need ‘Objectifies men, targets white people’ on a tshirt,” and a laughing emoji.

For the record, there’s more to Joy Ride than just raunch. “It’s a comedy that stands on its own merits while also adding a surprising amount of pathos to its story of an American woman discovering her Chinese roots,” Leigh Monson writes in The A.V. Club’s B+ review of the film. “But, ya know, with gags about shoving eight balloons of cocaine up one’s ass.”

Because pathos or not, the raunch is a selling point of the film, both for audiences and for the creators. Lim described developing something R-rated as a “palate cleanser” after co-writing Disney’s animated family adventure Raya And The Last Dragon. And the so-called “shock value” was a perfect fit for Seth Rogen’s production company Point Grey Pictures, she told The Hollywood Reporter.

“This is my hope and dream for all of us: that we wake up in the morning and we don’t think about, do I have to break a barrier? I don’t want to have to break a barrier. I want to just be able to tell an insane, ridiculous romp of a story and have it be celebrated. I don’t want to have to deal with the ‘is it going to be a first of its kind?’” Lim told the San Francisco Chronicle, adding with a laugh, “I am so proud of our movie that it does break barriers, that it is the first of its kind, but I don’t want us to be. I want us to be the first of a hundred disgusting, nasty stories from the AAPI community.”