Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass Review: David Wain's Joke Machine Lands More Than It Misses

Wain’s gang rides again

David Wain has spent two decades as American comedy’s great ringleader — Wet Hot American Summer, Role Models, They Came Together, and a decade of television in between — and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, co-written with longtime collaborator Ken Marino, is his first big-screen feature for Sony Pictures Classics. It premiered at Sundance in January to encouraging notices and arrived in theaters July 10 with the critical receipts of a solid mid-tier Wain outing: a Certified Fresh 77% on Rotten Tomatoes from 127 reviews, an 83% audience score, and a “generally favorable” 66 Metascore from 28 critics. Nobody is calling it his masterpiece. Almost everybody is admitting they laughed.

A joke machine built on a hall pass

The premise is a dirty joke expanded into a fable. Small-town Kansas hairdresser Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch) is engaged to her devoted high-school sweetheart Tom (Michael Cassidy) — until a book signing leads Tom to actually use the couple’s hypothetical “celebrity pass” agreement. Reeling, Gail impulsively follows her best friend Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) to Los Angeles, where a psychic convinces her the only way to balance the ledger is to cash in a pass of her own. Wain and Marino use The Wizard of Oz as a structural jumping-off point: Gail’s yellow-brick road runs through Hollywood, collecting companions — an agency assistant (Ben Wang), a paparazzo (Marino), John Slattery as a version of himself — on the way to her own Emerald City, which in this case is Jon Hamm, playing himself with visible relish.

Deutch holds the center

The film’s chief asset is Deutch, who plays Gail as plucky rather than pathetic — a woman treating sexual humiliation as a logistics problem to be solved. The Reveal’s Scott Tobias, while faulting the film’s hit-to-miss ratio and indifferent digital photography, singled out “Deutch’s plucky sexual adventurer” and concluded that “the gang is still hilarious.” The gang, for the record, runs deep: Wain-troupe regulars Fred Melamed, Richard Kind, Joe Lo Truglio, Kerri Kenney and Michael Ian Black fill the margins, with Sabrina Impacciatore, ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic and Penn Jillette dropping in. The Wall Street Journal’s Kyle Smith went furthest, calling it — “despite some thin spots” — “a comic highlight of the summer.”

The hit-to-miss problem

The reservations are consistent enough to take seriously. At 93 minutes the film is all pace and no architecture — Slant called it “a steady stream of gags and utter ridiculousness” that mostly throws softballs, and Screen Daily’s Sundance notice found jokes that “often feel like rehashes of something the Zucker Brothers did better decades ago.” The Austin Chronicle delivered the most backhanded of the pans: “The heart’s there, no doubt about it. If it only had better laughs.” Audiences are so far kinder than the strictest critics — an 83% verified audience score against the 77% Tomatometer — but the opening frame was soft: under $900,000 from 1,000 theaters, an #11 debut that suggests word of mouth will decide whether this one has legs on the way to streaming.

Verdict

Gail Daughtry is Wain operating at about seventy percent capacity, and seventy percent of Wain is still funnier than most studio comedy at full throttle. Deutch is a genuine star turn, the cameo bench is absurdly deep, and when the jokes connect — which is more often than not — they connect hard. What keeps it short of the top shelf is construction: a sketch-movie spine, a few recycled bits, and a premise that never quite becomes a story. For anyone who owns a Wet Hot t-shirt, that will not matter. See it with a crowd.