Film reviews: Joy Ride | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem | Paris Memories | Talk to Me
Joy Ride (15) ****
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (PG) **
Paris Memories (15) ****
Talk to Me (15) ***
A brash summer raunch-fest in The Hangover/Bridesmaids mould, Joy Ride sees Crazy Rich Asians co-writer Adele Lim make her directorial debut with a furiously funny Asian-American road trip comedy about cultural identity, familial estrangement and the wisdom of getting a vaginal tattoo. Ashley Park stars as Audrey, a super-capable Seattle lawyer whose imminent promotion depends on closing a deal in China, a country she hasn’t returned to since being adopted as a baby by a white American family. Going along for the ride, and to help with translation, is her best friend Lolo (comic Sherry Cola), a penniless maker of sexually provocative art who’s been Audrey’s best friend since they were kids.
The film swiftly and hilariously establishes their symbiotic relationship with a playground-set prologue – and just as quickly disrupts it, first by having them forced to chaperone Lolo’s socially awkward cousin, Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), as she makes her own pilgrimage to China to visit relatives, then by amplify Lolo’s own insecurities by having them hook-up with Audrey’s hard-partying college best friend Kat, now an actress in a hit martial arts show and about to marry her hunky Christian co-star, who knows nothing of her somewhat salacious past.
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Hide AdPlayed by Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Stephanie Hsu, Kat is the owner of the aforementioned tattoo, which later becomes the source of a raucous musical set-piece and a brilliant gag involving an old Looney Tunes character. But the culture-clashing comedy is really set in motion when the businessman Audrey is in Shanghai to impress takes a dim view of her lack of awareness of her own heritage, prompting her to seek out her birth mother. High jinks involving copious drug consumption and sexual encounters with a basketball team follow, as do wry potshots at virtue-signalling misogynists, racist relatives and internalised bigotry, all of it delivered with real comic brio by a confident, up-for-anything cast whose collective ability to make you care for their characters ensures the more thoughtful turn the film takes in its final act feels earned. This is a film that lives up to its title.
That one of the funnier throwaway gags in Joy Ride involves a sexual fantasy about Splinter, the sewer-rat ninja father of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, turns out be a cheeky bit of cross-promotion from Joy Ride’s producers Seth Rogen and Evan Handler, who are also the co-producers and co-writers of the new TMNT reboot. Sadly, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is an oddly muted return for the heroes in a half-shell. After three live-action films in the 1990s and two unloved Michael Bay-produced reboots in the 2010s, the new film goes the animated route, borrowing the beautiful hand-painted aesthetics of the recent Spider-Verse films, which is striking for a little while, but the script’s efforts to re-establish the pizza-loving TMNT’s relevance falls flat with dated references to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and shout-outs to Beyoncé, Batman and the Avengers. There’s none of the ribald humour of Rogen and Handler’s modern teen classic Superbad either, and the origins-story plot simply re-cycles the first X-Men movie.
The aftermath of a Bataclan-style terrorist attack is the subject of Paris Memories, the latest film from Proxima director Alice Winocour. Inspired by her own brother’s experiences of being caught up in the aforementioned 2015 night club attack, her film takes a sensitive, deeply humane approach to tragedy by zeroing in on Mia (Virginie Efire), the survivor of a gun attack on a cafe. Shattering life as she’s known it, the massacre – which Winocour films from Mia’s point of view as she throws herself to the floor before blacking out – becomes a fractured event in her own mind, the trauma erasing any certainty about what happened and how she survived. The bulk of the film revolves around Mia’s efforts to reconstruct the night in question, first by joining a support group for fellow survivors, then by trying to track down an undocumented kitchen worker she vaguely remembers from the shooting. Here, Winocour slyly turns the film into a detective story, one in which her protagonist isn’t so much trying to find her place in a city forever transformed by a terrible event, but her place in a city in which a terrible event has shattered some of its romantic illusions, revealing a deeper, richer, more complex reality that’s been there all along.
Entertainingly slick, if never exactly scary, the hip new Australian horror offering Talk to Me serves up a nifty riff on the ouija board party games of horror movies past by replacing this portal to the spirit world with the embalmed severed hand of a vengeful medium. Encased in porcelain, said hand is now the source of a social media-fuelled game in which suburban teens encourage their friends to hold it and utter the titutlar phrase “Talk to Me” while subjecting themselves to the merciless glare of their friends’ live-streaming smart phones as they endure an apparently terrifying brief encounter with the afterlife.
As none of these kids appear to have seen a horror film from the last 50 years, there’s no shortage of volunteers; mercifully debut directors Danny and Michael Phillippou cut quickly to the chase with some inventively rendered shocks and offset the premise’s inherent silliness by grounding their main character Mia's decision to participate in the game in the trauma of her own mother’s suicide (Mia is nicely played by Sophie Wilde). Though the resulting film owes much to the like of Flatliners and the Evil Dead, it’s a solid launch pad for the Phillippou brothers.
Joy Ride and Paris Memories are in cinemas from 4 August; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and Talk to Me are in cinemas now.