Review: GAIL DAUGHTRY AND THE CELEBRITY SEX PASS

 by Rob DiCristino

A new David Wain joint to kick off your wet hot American summer.

It just occurred to me that I’ve watched three new Zoey Deutch movies in the past week. The first was Voicemails for Isabelle, a tropey Netflix rom-com so disinterested in its own premise that I found myself far more enamoured with Zoey’s character opening a dessert taco truck than I was with the douchey real estate bro she was supposed to be falling in love with. The second movie was Minions & Monsters, another incoherent mess from the criminals at Illumination, which Letterboxd will try to convince you is good because it makes a couple of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton references in the first ten minutes (Don’t fall for it! It’s bad). I know that even Hollywood scions need to pay the bills, but I was starting to worry that Deutch wouldn’t get the opportunity to build on her strong 2025, a year that saw her headlining the truly demented comedy The Threesome and playing Jean Seberg in Richard Linklater’s ode to the Nouvelle Vague, the title of which is escaping me at the moment. Deutch is a real talent, and it would be a shame to see Hollywood waste her.

Luckily, the third movie I saw this week was Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, the newest comedy from The State and Stella mastermind David Wain. Co-written with longtime collaborator Ken Marino, Gail Daughtry introduces us to Gail (Deutch) and Tom (Michael Cassidy), two pieces of starchy, Middle-American white bread putting the final touches on their dream wedding. These high school sweethearts may only have eyes for each other — much to the chagrin of Gail’s best friend, Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), who thinks she can do better — but even the world’s most perfect couple has had the “celebrity sex pass” discussion (Tom’s is Jennifer Aniston; Gail’s is Jon Hamm). Well, guess who’s in town for a book signing just before the wedding? Jennifer Aniston! Guess who Gail catches balls-deep inside of Aniston after the signing? Tom! Guess who’s suddenly having doubts about her relationship and planning to even the playing field by taking a trip to Tinseltown and fucking Jon Hamm? Gail again! Guess who gives this premise two thumbs up? Me!

While few films will ever approach the absurdist perfection of Wain’s 2001 debut, Wet Hot American Summer, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass at least gives his incredibly talented stock company another opportunity to run roughshod all over our favorite genre cliches. It’s packed wall-to-wall with celebrity cameos — everyone from “Weird Al” Yankovic to Elizabeth Banks — and carried along by Wain co-conspirators like Joe Lo Truglio, Thomas Lennon, Kerry Kennedy-Silver, and Michael Ian Black. At its heart, though, is Gail’s posse: There’s Otto, who’s in LA for a hair dressing convention led by “King of the Whip Curl” Remy Fontaine (Lennon). Then there’s bright-eyed CAA intern Caleb (Ben Wang), down-on-his-luck paparazzo Vincent (Marino), and Hamm’s Mad Men co-star John Slattery, who’s looking for an opportunity to relive his 2010s glory days. There’s also a fierce mafiosa (Sabrina Impacciatore) and her stolen documents, a security guard who wants to make you sick (Tobie Windham), and Paul Rudd because, I don’t know. Why not?

But wait! We were talking about Zoey Deutch! She’s predictably perfect in the lead role, playing each of Wain and Marino’s ridiculous scenarios straight as a rail (which, when those scenarios involve bare-knuckle manslaughter, a Mexican standoff in an Old West town, and [spoilers?] raucous sex with Jon Hamm, is harder than you’d think). Comedy is subjective, of course, so I can’t tell you if you’ll find any of this funny. What I can say, though, is that Gail Daughtry embodies The State’s patented comedy ethos — that is, following the oddest of premises to their most illogical extremes — with the highest success rate of any project I’ve seen from Wain since 2014’s massively underrated They Came Together. There isn’t necessarily anything in Gail Daughtry that you haven’t seen from these guys before, but in an age when writers are trying to stretch sketch-sized bits out into feature length movies — Yes, I’m inexplicably talking shit on Friendship again — it’s nice to see a ninety minute comedy that actually leans into form and structure rather than struggling to resist it.

It’s that commitment to sending up familiar genre structures that keeps Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass anchored in (sur)reality when things start to get too inside baseball for anyone who hasn’t spent thirty years working in the entertainment industry. After all, “Small Town Girl and Her Gay Best Friend Have an Adventure in the Big City” is a lot more relatable to audiences than “Major Studio Projects Are Often Packaged in a Counterintuitive Fashion, Aren’t They?” A healthy dose of tried-and-true gags gives Wain and Marino the latitude to play around with those more specialized, idiosyncratic edges, and by the time the film lands on a Wizard of Oz-inspired finale — answering our central question in the funniest possible way — we’re reminded that the best parodies are always rooted in sincere affection. Just as Wain and company composed a love letter to ‘70s summer camps with Wet Hot American Summer, Gail Daughtry celebrates an idealized vision of Hollywood that, while still defined by cupidity and caprice, has never failed to capture our imaginations.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass hits U.S. theaters on Friday, July 10th.