Since its premiere 25 years ago, David Wain’s highly quotable and frequently bizarre Wet Hot American Summer has risen from a cult classic into one of the century’s finest comedies. Wain and his collaborators—many of whom cut their teeth on the MTV sketch series The State—opted for a deadpan delivery that rewards multiple viewings. It also has the benefit of casting celebrities such as Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, and Bradley Cooper (in his first film role) before they were famous worldwide.
Wain attempts to re-create that magic and chaos with Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, another surrealist comedy with a deep cast of familiar faces. That attempt, however, is such a failure that its only value is to study where it went so wrong.
On paper, the premise is promising enough. Zoey Deutch plays Gail, a well-liked Kansas hairdresser who charms everyone with her pluck and utter lack of guile. She has an innocent enough conversation with her fiance, Tom (Michael Cassidy), about their “celebrity sex pass,” the famous person they can fuck consequence-free. Tom’s pass is for Jennifer Aniston, and when she comes to Kansas for a book reading, he finds himself between her legs (to her credit, Aniston does a decent job of skewering the actor/influencer path that many from her generation follow). After Gail catches Tom, she decides to travel to Los Angeles, where she hopes to find Jon Hamm, her longtime sex pass. Her trip to L.A. turns into a strange odyssey where she meets obstacles and friends at every turn, including John Slattery as himself, as well as angry mobsters who want her dead for reasons too stupid to explain here.
Did you see Fool’s Paradise, the 2023 movie written and directed by It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Charlie Day? It is also a celebrity-packed L.A. comedy, where you get the sense that each subsequent cameo is the creator calling in a favor. It is understandable if you missed Fool’s Paradise because it is similarly awful, a galling misfire where supposedly funny people don’t understand what made them so successfully appealing in the first place. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass practically unfolds like its sequel, right down to its episodic nature and one-dimensional hero. Deutch can be charming, as she is in the gangster thriller The Outfit or last year’s Nouvelle Vague, but this time her appeal achieves the opposite of its intended effect. The screenplay by Wain and his longtime collaborator Ken Marino make Gail into someone cloying and tedious, rather than a sympathetic fish-out-of-water type. The writing simply lacks the necessary friction to highlight her character’s comic potential.
Deutch’s performance, however, is part of a much larger miscalculation. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass lacks a strong foundation. Wet Hot American Summer, a parody of cheesy summer camp comedies from the late ’70s and early ’80s, understands the need for a sense of structure. Tropes and cliches of the subgenre might be easy targets, but they create a shared sense of reality so the audience and performers understand the satirical target. Even The Naked Gun movies recognize the importance of that structure, as they use the framework of a cop thriller to guide viewers through the mayhem. Wain and Marino have no similar foundation here, except for a thin riff on The Wizard of Oz they barely interrogate, and their comedy suffers for it. Many scenes sag under the weight of their awkward setup. Enamored with his project to a fault, Wain forgets that surprise and crisp writing are important elements of a good comedy.
Beyond the lack of structure, the tone of Wain’s latest is downright off-putting. Deutch and the other actors, including Marino as a paparazzi and Miles Gutierrez-Riley as Gail’s sidekick Otto, almost always deliver their lines like they know they’re in on the joke. This creates an ingratiating quality and a cringey desire to please that obliterates any genuine comic payoff. Other frequent Wain collaborators like Kerri Kenney-Silver and Joe Lo Truglio cannot resist the urge to ham it up for the camera, while the novelty appeal of actors appearing as themselves loses its power because Wain never asks them to parody their own public image. By the time Gail invariably confronts Hamm, there’s no tension because, time and time again, Wain opts for the safest or easiest way for a scene to unfold.
Occasional flashes of brilliance make Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass all the more frustrating. The aforementioned Slattery is a rare highlight, playing a belligerent version of himself who fell on hard times since Mad Men went off the air. Wain’s best comedies, not just Wet Hot, are rewarding because they give the impression that he doesn’t give a damn whether you find them funny. They are too confident for that, a show of bravado that alienates and welcomes viewers equally. Gail Daughtry goes in the complete opposite direction: It’s so nakedly desperate in its desire to be likable that it forgets it should be funny first.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass (R, 93 mins.) opens in area theaters on July 10.
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