Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass<\/a>, the latest absurdist comedy from David Wain.<\/p>\nWain is a hit-or-miss auteur who has directed seven comedies of a similar gag-filled nature, with his debut, the cult classic\u00a0Wet Hot American Summer, almost universally acknowledged as his gold standard. But\u00a0Gail Daughtry\u00a0(opening Thursday in South Florida theaters) may be his most effective knee-slapper since 2007\u2019s underrated\u00a0The Ten. And as a ribald, laugh-out-loud caper, it\u2019s a unicorn in today\u2019s multiplexes, where comedies have all but disappeared, left behind amid the trendier contrails of liminal horror, franchise blockbusters, and zeitgeist-chasing epics.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no zeitgeist present in\u00a0Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which, if anything, conjures the Los Angeles of a bygone era, the sort of Kodachrome, deliberately artificial fantasyland to which Naomi Watts\u2019 small-town ingenue, Betty, descends on the escalator in David Lynch\u2019s\u00a0Mulholland Drive. The title character in\u00a0Gail Daughtry, a hair stylist played by Zoey Deutsch, similarly lands in Hollywood from a small town, this one in Kansas (yes, there\u2019s a\u00a0Wizard of Oz\u00a0joke in Wain and co-writer Ken Marino\u2019s script, and it works).<\/p>\n
Her trip to the City of Angels, ostensibly to attend a beauty convention with her sassy co-worker Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), is actually a revenge quest of sorts. Her fianc\u00e9e and high school sweetheart Tom (Michael Cassidy) has just redeemed his own \u201ccelebrity sex pass\u201d by meeting and bedding Jennifer Aniston in the back of a bookstore, following the latter\u2019s public reading from her cookbook. So Gail, on the advice of a storefront psychic, determines that the only way to save her marriage is to find and coerce her own celebrity sex pass, Jon Hamm, into the sheets.<\/p>\n
For a film that\u2019s actually \u201cabout\u201d very little,\u00a0Gail Daughtry\u00a0abounds in plot, introducing a nemesis, played with deft comic timing by Sabrina Impacciatore, intent on stealing government secrets and, in her own words, \u201cdisrupting the global financial system.\u201d There\u2019s some important business involving the Hitchcockian switcheroo of Gail\u2019s hardbound suitcase with an identical case, and gangsters\u2014olive-toned types straight of\u00a0The Sopranos\u2019 central casting, who, in a great recurring bit, don\u2019t speak a word of Italian\u2014who must retrieve the case and kill Gail. Along the way, Gail assembles a ragtag crew of misfits to assist in her rendezvous with Hamm, including a meek wannabe agent from Creative Artists Agency; a paparazzo who considers Hamm his personal \u201cgreat white whale,\u201d the celeb who got away; and the character actor John Slattery, who co-starred with Hamm on\u00a0Mad Men, and who gamely portrays an out-of-work version of himself.<\/p>\n
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And, as befits a caricatured vision of Hollywood, celebrities appear in droves, most of whom have starred in other projects in the Wain universe, from Paul Rudd to Elizabeth Banks. Penn Jillette is cast as the silent partner alongside \u201cWeird Al\u201d Yankovic, and is appropriately never given a line. If you appreciate why this casting decision is so funny, this is the comedy for you.<\/p>\n
But it won\u2019t be for everyone. If you desire a modicum of logic or sensible behavior or realistic dialogue, you\u2019ll still be fumbling for these intangibles after the credits have rolled. \u201cEveryone is such a character in this town,\u201d Gail comments, after their cab driver (Richard Kind) expresses his obsession with the actor Elizabeth Perkins, and then requests a mid-drive rest to recharge his batteries.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all ridiculous, but knowingly so. Wain is an ironic reveler in cliches, delivering riff after riff with a wink and a nod to the most hackneyed of story mechanics, from the heroes always prepared with a quippy rejoinder to the bad guys spending way,\u00a0way\u00a0too many beats laughing maniacally in each other\u2019s faces.<\/p>\n
These bits work because too many movies still indulge in these trite chestnuts with a straight face, absent Wain\u2019s postmodern quotation marks. And so his best audiences will always be ones well-versed in Hollywood cinema at its clunkiest and most sentimental (guilty as charged). For me, this film\u2019s best antecedent is 1997\u2019s\u00a0The Wrong Guy, a criminally underseen vehicle for Dave Foley as a businessman\u2014nodding again to Hitchcock\u2014wrongly pursued for a murder, who finds himself at the center of a madcap conspiracy that is more anachronistically eccentric than commercially zany. Time will tell whether\u00a0Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass\u00a0will be just as memorable in 30 years. But right now, in 2026, it\u2019s just about the funniest thing I\u2019ve seen all year.<\/p>\n
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass opens Thursday, July 9 at AMC Pompano Beach 18, Regal Magnolia Place in Coral Springs, and other area theaters. <\/p>\n
\nFor more of Boca magazine\u2019s arts and entertainment coverage, click here.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source bocamag.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sometimes a movie just needs to be funny. There are no embedded sociopolitical critiques or deeper meanings hidden among the jokes\u2014and there are myriad; nearly every line is either a setup to a bit or a response to it\u2014in\u00a0Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, the latest absurdist comedy from David Wain. Wain is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2493345,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2493344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Movie-Review-Gail-Daughtry-and-the-Celebrity-Sex-Pass.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2493344"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2493346,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493344\/revisions\/2493346"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2493345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2493344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2493344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2493344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}