Breaking Down the Emotional and Whirlwind ‘Joy Ride’ Ending

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Were you laughing so loud that you totally missed how Joy Ride ended? Or, honestly, crying... because the end of that movie got e-mo-tion-al!!!! Maybe you were just overall confused as to how everything went so wrong and then kinda worked itself out. That's the magic of comedy, baby! But for real... here's what you need to know about the ending of Joy Ride. Spoilers ahead you guys!! Go see the movie if you haven't ASAP.

Joy Ride, as you know, is the story of Asian adoptee Audrey Sullivan's business trip gone awry turned girl's trip gone awry. Sealing a deal at a club might seem less scary for Audrey with her childhood bestie Lolo, her famous former college roommate Kat, and Lolo's stan culture expert cousin Deadeye. But when an overseas colleague requests to meet Audrey's Chinese birth mother, the search to finally locate her takes them to some unexpected places. They become drug mules, lose their passports, and break a basketball team (don't ask) along the way. They then discover that Audrey's biological parents are Korean, not Chinese. To get to Seoul they pose as a K-pop group to get to another country entirely. Of course, everything falls apart. The girls go viral, Audrey loses her job, and Kat's job and relationship are in need of serious damage control. The girls make it to Korea but get not before getting into such a bad fight that they part ways.

Audrey connects with her birth mother in an unexpected way

Audrey is able to find a record of her biological mother in Seoul. But she also learns that the woman who gave birth to her, Min Park, recently died. At her grave, a man approaches her played by Dr. Han from The Good Doctor himself, Daniel Dae Kim. The handsome stranger turns out to be Audrey's birth mother's widower. He's not related to her by blood (biological stepfather isn't really a thing, is it??) but still gives her a sense of closure and belonging. Back at his home he tells her about her mother, and even shows her a video she recorded for Audrey before she died just in case.

I'm crying again just thinking about it! Bubbling underneath the raunchy jokes and shenanigans in Joy Ride, Audrey has been going through a pretty major identity crisis. Because of her white parents, her Chinese friends don't fully accept her in a mostly-joking-but-still-hurtful kind of way. Then she finds out that she's actually Korean, and was never Chinese to begin with, and that her parent is dead. That's a lot to take in! Kim's character is a port in that emotional storm that helps her feel like she belongs somewhere and realizes her path forward.

It was all arranged by her friends

It seems like a coincidence that Audrey just happened to run into him at the graveyard, but it's not. Lolo, Kat, and Deadeye tracked him down and told him that she might be there. Her bio mom's husband reveals this as she goes to leave. They still care about her.

So she makes up with them!

Audrey and her friends have little trouble getting back to China and the United States despite their lost passports and low-key crime spree. Shout out to the embassy, I guess! Sometimes, especially in movies like this, you gotta suspend your disbelief. In an homage to the great romantic gestures of cinema history, Audrey goes to the restaurant where Lolo and Deadeye work and publicly apologizes to both of them.

One year later...

The friends reunite one year later and take a trip to Paris. Audrey has a new job at her own practice. Kat is selling her art and keeping a steady job while she does so. Lolo made up with her fiancé. Kat and Lolo are friends now, too. (Isn't it kind of iconic that they bonded over being annoyed by their mutual?) Deadeye, who has started using they/them pronouns in the year that passed, was inspired by Kat to get a tattoo. We don't see their tattoo, but it is heavily implied that it's pretty shocking.

Does the now-established yearly tradition mean that we'll get a Joy Ride sequel? I really, really hope so. We'll just have to wait and see, while rewatching Joy Ride over and over for jokes and details and anything else we may have missed.

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