Both Paul & myself react to the latest comedy from director David Wain (WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER) and friends!
About: In Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass (2026), a small-town Kansas hairdresser travels to Hollywood to “even the scales” and pursue her celebrity crush, Jon Hamm, after her fiancé uses their agreed-upon hall pass to sleep with Jennifer Aniston.
Paul’s Reaction: Humour is a very subjective thing. One person’s Jackass is another person’s Blazing Saddles. And so it goes with Gail Daughtry, a comedy that lampoons Hollywood and celebrity culture with a premise that is more than a little moronic: an attractive small-town fiancée goes to LA on a quest to have sex with Jon Hamm, after she finds her true love in flagrante delicto with a major female Hollywood celebrity at a local book signing. It is the so called “celebrity sex pass”, where you are allowed to stray one time, as long as it is with a ridiculously famous fantasy sex object. The gags are very silly and seem to rely on having everyone behaving like cretins. The tone is all over the place including some out-of-place violence involving a female mobster whose luggage gets switched upon arrival at the LA airport. Many local sites are visited, from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to the Chateau Marmont, and a whole slew of celebrities seem willing to act like “low-IQ individuals” to show they are in on the joke (Weird Al Yankovic, John Slattery, Elizabeth Perkins, Jennifer Anniston) all them acting like they have no intelligence or basic judgement whatsoever. Still, this film played the Sundance and the Tribeca Film Festivals, and some reviews have been very positive. Others have not been, with viewers’ opinions varying from 1/10 to 10/10. About one in every five gags sorta lands, (McDonald’s and Foot Locker being suggested as exceptional tourist destinations to visit while on Hollywood Boulevard is a funny and tackily accurate gag for example) but mostly you are just asked to laugh at Hollywood types behaving very stupidly. Funnier than Jackass is not the highest praise, but that will have to do.
Rating: 5 out of 10
Jason’s Reaction: Good lord. I normally don’t comment on the overall theatrical experience of movies I write about, but I saw this one in a completely empty theatre (no, really; I was the only one in attendance at the VERY first public screening) that had luxury power recliners, and about 30 minutes in this dead-zone of a comedy my brain decided it needed to take a little rest, and I fell asleep. I am not sure whether or not to thank the recliners for giving me a break from this movie or not. Either way, the experience of this badly titled “comedy” was so insufferable that if I didn’t have another screening to attend either, I would have just walked home and laid down on my actual bed.
Throughout, this nightmare of a premise about getting revenge on a man cheating on Jennifer Aniston made me feel unclean and even struck my moral boundaries on relationships. If the movie was funnier or had a sharper satire I could have passed it off, but GAIL DAUGHTRY doesn’t even want to try. It actually has the balls to suggest that Jennifer Aniston would sleep with a random man in Kansas after a book signing, then saying it’s okay for his wife to get back at him by sleeping with Jon Hamm.
It has one unfunny performance after the next with what made me feel like too many characters all crashing against each other in a wall of noise and antics all set around the LA entertainment scene. Even the lovely Zoey Deutch (who is a far cry from her brilliant performance as Jean Seberg in NOUVELLE VAGUE) doesn’t convince me she even believes in this material. There’s no real reason to care about whether Gail gets to sleep with Jon Hamm (his name is said so many times in this picture that you could start a drinking game) as we are assaulted with one terrible performance and cameo right after the other, from the insulting performance by John Slattery as a distanced old co-worker to Hamm, or even the celebrity cameos; words failed me as I witnessed a “Weird Al” Yankovic interaction that I wish could have been stricken from the record. The framing device from the usually reliable Fred Melamed is even wasted (though he did give me ONE laugh with his dialogue as the movie ended, which led me to yell out “FINALLY” in an empty auditorium. There’s also an endless sequence involving an old Western set that I will admit is the section of the movie I fell asleep to, so I actually don’t know how long it went on. Probably longer than I thought.
To my utter shock, this garbage comes from the usually funny director David Wain, whose WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER I will put on every now and then just to cheer me up. Here, not a single character has a redeemable quality nor does any performance know how to reign it in. You can tell Wain probably convinced all of the actors how much fun this movie would be just to hang out with the old gang again, but none of that result is actually on screen. Everyone is so insaley over the top and trying too hard to be funny, dialogue feels over-explained to the point Wain thinks the audience is stupid, and even the eventual meeting of Jon Hamm doesn’t land, because even HE goes along with the bonkers idea of a woman sleeping with him as revenge. Even in a silly comedy like this, I’m just not buying it.
But hey, if you still plan to see it based on my take along with Paul’s middling review, at least make sure you’re watching the movie in a recliner seat I guess.
Rating: 1 out of 10
