Producers: Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, James Weaver, Josh Fagen, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, Teresa Hsiao and Adele Lim   Director: Adele Lim    Screenplay: Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao   Cast: Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu, Sabrina Wu, Ronny Chieng, Meredith Hagner, David Denman, Annie Mumolo, Desmond Chiam, Isla Rose Hall, Chloe Pun, Miranda Wan, Lennon Yee, Lori Tan Chinn, Baron Davis, Alexander Hodge, Chris Pang, Rohan Arora, Victor Lau, Paul Cheng, Johnny Wu and Timothy Simons   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C+

The amount of enjoyment you’ll get out of Adele Lim’s debut feature will depend on your tolerance for comedy that’s unabashedly crude and vulgar.  “Joy Ride” is a trip of the “Hangover” variety, in which a disparate bunch of friends go through a series of raunchy, raucous adventures together.  The difference lies in the fact that they’re women rather than men, and for good measure, Asian women; so reflections of “Bridesmaids,” “Rough Night,” “Girls Trip” and “Crazy Rich Asians” are all thrown into the mix.  Many viewers will find the result uproarious; some will be more queasy, longing for the days when humor meant wit and style rather than blunderbuss coarseness.

The premise: Audrey, who was adopted by the Sullivans (David Denman and Annie Mumolo), and Lolo (Sherry Cola), the daughter of the Chens (Kenneth Liu and Debbie Fan), have been best friends since they were five, when they met at a playground in the aptly-named White Falls, Washington, and pugnacious Lolo (Miranda Wan) clobbered a kid who insulted them, much to shy Audrey’s (Lennon Yee) astonishment and admiration.  Quickly sprinting through their adolescence (with Chloe Pun as Lolo and Isla Rose Hall as Audrey at age 12), the movie winds up in the present, where they remain BFFs, though reserved, businesslike Audrey is a corporate lawyer and voluble free-spirit Lolo lives in a garage apartment, sculpting subversive artwork with bodily allusions that makes most viewers blanch while occasionally helping out at her folks’ restaurant.

Audrey’s colleagues don’t realize that throwing her a Mulan-theme birthday party is no compliment, but she embraces an assignment that will take her to Beijing to close a big deal that could lift her to a spot up the ladder at the firm’s L.A. headquarters.  The problem is that though they think she’s fluent in Mandarin, she’s not, so she invites Lolo to come along to translate.  Lolo happily agrees, though at the airport Audrey finds that a third party will be joining them—Lolo’s sad-sack cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), who wants desperately to be accepted as one of the crew, which is completed when the trio meet up in China with Audrey’s college roommate Kat (Stephanie Hsu), now a star of TV costume dramas in which she shares the screen with hunky leading man Clarence (Desmond Chiam), who also happens to be her fiancé. 

When it comes time for Audrey to sit down with Chao (Ronny Chieng), the businessman she’s to negotiate with, he turns out to be a hedonist who takes them to a drug-and-alcohol-fueled bacchanal at a glitzy club, and eventually learns that Audrey doesn’t know her Chinese roots—a sticking-point for him.  Luckily Lolo had already been pressing Audrey to take the opportunity to search out her birth mother, and made preliminary inquiries; and so the four women are off to find her.

The trip, of course, goes haywire quickly as the quartet encounter Jess (Meredith Hagner), a frazzled American who turns out to be a drug dealer, on the train, and are tossed off in the middle of nowhere, sans luggage or passports, by a cop (Paul Cheng) who doesn’t want to bother with them.  But they quickly link up—in rather intimate ways—with a traveling Chinese National Basketball team consisting of American Baron Jones and teammates of varied nationalities (Alexander Hodge, Chris Pang, Rohan Arora and Victor Lau).  After that they make their way to a reunion at Lolo and Deadeye’s relatives, where petite but intense Grandma Chen (Lori Tan Chinn) reacts acerbically to news about where the search for Audrey’s parents has led.  Getting there requires a madcap imposture in which the women pretend to be a K-pop group and a mega-fan (Johnny Wu) shows up to support them

As all this unfolds, there are inevitable rifts among the four travelers, as well as a series of predictably wild episodes involving, among other things, horrendously embarrassing tattoos and revelations that could wreck relationships (Kat, for example, has been pretending to be a virgin in order to hew to the expectations of Clarence, a fundamentalist Christian, although Audrey knows that’s patently untrue).  As the movie lurches to a destination, friendships have apparently been shattered, but it’s predestined that they’ll be restored in time for a one-year later postscript.  As for Audrey, her search for her birth mother has a bittersweet outcome.  In short, by the close after all the rowdiness sentiment triumphs. 

All four of the stars help carry the picture from sketch to sketch, but while Park and Hsu have their moments (some quite gross), Cola and Wu are the real sparkplugs here—Cola with her ferocious, take-no-prisoners attitude and filter-free mouth and Wu with her laid-back mixture of sadness and eagerness to please.  (It’s rather a shock when she lashes out at a young cousin at the reunion.)  Everyone else does what’s required of them, and most get at least one moment to shine; Chinn is a particular delight.  The tech contributions—Michael Norman Wong’s production design, Paul Yee’s cinematography and Nena Erb’s editing–are more workmanlike than inspired (Beverley Huynh’s costumes are, however, outstanding) and Nathan Matthew David’s score follows suit, but overall this has the look and feel of a glossy sitcom.

As with most R-rated comedies nowadays, the supposed outrageousness of “Joy Ride” has a calculated quality that makes it seem like slightly stale goods, and isn’t for everyone to begin with.  But the Asian POV freshens things up some.    

Producers: Alex Saks, Naomi Odenkirk, Marc Provissiero, Jennifer Lawrence and Justine Ciarrocchi   Director: Gene Stupnitsky   Screenplay: Gene Stupnitsky and John Phillips   Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Matthew Broderick, Laura Benanti, Natalie Morales, Hasan Minhaj, Scott MacArthur, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Kyle Mooney, Zahn McClarnon, Jordan Mendoza, Amalia Yoo, Alysia Joy Powell and Quincy Dunn-Baker   Distributor: Sony/Columbia Pictures

Grade: C+

An attempt to commingle raunchiness and sweetness succeeds only sporadically in Gene Stupnitsky’s “No Hard Feelings,” a double entendre title for a movie that’s a throwback of sorts to the naughty but nice teen romps of decades past.  It benefits, however, from the pairing of Jennifer Lawrence and newcomer Andrew Barth Feldman, who manage to make their characters surprisingly likable despite the screenplay’s missteps.

The picture begins with a pretty icky premise.  A rich couple summering in Montauk, Laird and Allison Becker (Mathew Broderick and Laura Benanti), are concerned about their withdrawn, reclusive son Percy (Feldman).  He’s been accepted at Princeton for the fall, but they’re afraid that his social awkwardness will doom his chance to have a fulfilling college experience.  So they decide in effect to hire a girl to seduce him and bring him out of his shell.  They put an advertisement on the Internet, offering a car to the successful applicant if she fulfills the assignment.  It’s a set-up reminiscent of the cliché in old movies, especially Westerns, in which a macho guy took his son to a brothel so that he could “become a man” by having his initial experience of sex.  Updating it to the present somehow makes it even creepier.  

Anyway, just by accident local Maddie Barker (Lawrence) learns of the ad from her pregnant friend Sarah (Natalie Morales).  In one of the script’s clumsiest coincidences, she happens to be in desperate need of a car at the moment, hers having been impounded for back taxes at the very time she’s supplementing her bartender income as an Uber driver in order to raise the funds needed to save the house she inherited from her mother from being seized by the government too.  So she applies for the job even though at thirty-two she’s considerably older than the Beckers had envisioned.

Maddie then approaches Percy at the only place he apparently leaves the house to go—the dog-adoption service where he works as a volunteer alongside protective boss Doug (Hasan Minhaj).  Wearing a slinky dress, she comes on to Percy and insists on giving him a ride home in a van she’s borrowed from Sarah’s surfer-dude husband Jim (Scott MacArthur).  Percy’s terrified belief that she’s trying to kidnap him ends the ride with him pulling out his can of Mace, but eventually the misunderstanding is cleared up and he agrees to go out on a date with her. 

The movie alternates between rowdy sequences—Maddie futilely trying to take back the car that’s being towed away by Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), one of the guys she ghosted after a single date; Maddie getting drenched with a hose trying to get the Mace from her eyes; an evening skinny dip on the beach that leads to a fight between a naked Maddie and three drunken kids trying to steal their clothes—and simple slapstick, as when Maddie tries to negotiate the Beckers’ hillside driveway while on roller skates (why didn’t she simply take them off?), with others designed to explain her harsh personality and rejection of commitment (daddy issues) and the wall Percy’s built around himself (school bullying about his reported over-closeness with his parents). 

There are also moments designed to show Maddie’s essential soft-heartedness (her concerns about Sarah and Jim having to move for financial reasons, and the lengths to which she’ll go to help them) and how Percy has been molded into the person he is (a meeting with his aggressive ex-nanny, played by an unsettling Kyle Mooney).  And there’s, inevitably, the anger Percy feels when he finds out that his parents had hired Maddie; unfortunately, it takes the form of a car-destruction scene that feels like a “Ferris Bueller” rip-off.  But there are also occasional throwaway bits that work surprisingly well, like the reaction of Native American Zahn McClarnon, in a single-scene cameo, when Maddie complains that he doesn’t understand what it’s like having the government take your property.

In all, this is a movie that swings back and forth between attempts to be over-the-top comic and others designed to be insightful observations about the lead characters.  Fortunately Lawrence proves to be up for everything, playing even a poorly-written scene in which she’s the oldest “guest” at an incoming-freshmen Princeton party with conviction.  And newcomer Feldman is an ingratiating presence.  Looking a bit like a young Jamie Bell (think Billy Elliott with a few years added on), he endows naïve Percy with an innocence that makes you root for him.  He even manages a potentially disastrous musical scene, when he’s taken Maddie on a “prom” date (both skipped their real ones) and is prodded by her to show off his keyboard skills at a restaurant, where he undertakes a Vegas lounge-like version of “Maneater.”  As for the supporting cast, many, like MacArthur and Mooney, come off too strong, but Broderick, boasting a huge mane of greying hair (and a pretty ample stomach), goes the opposite route with a laid-back turn in which he seems utterly comfortable.

The movie is attractive visually, not just because of Lawrence but because actual New York locations are nicely used by production designer Russell Barnes and cinematographer Eigil Bryld.  Editor Brent White keeps the action moving along, and the score by Mychael Danna and Jessica Rose Weiss stays within reasonable bounds for this sort of high-concept rom-com. 

But in the final analysis “No Hard Feelings” feels ambivalent about what sort of movie it wants to be—a raunchy sex farce or a sensitive study of two troubled people whose unlikely friendship helps both overcome their problems—and in trying to be both, it seems forced and unconvincing.  Lawrence and Feldman, however, almost pull it off.