A little more than halfway through the extremely silly \u201cGail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,\u201d the main character questions the very idea behind her journey, and, by extension, the movie itself. In it, Zoey Deutch\u2019s character Gail embarks on a \u201cWizard of Oz\u201d-like journey from Kansas to Hollywood to even the score with her fiance and have sex with her celebrity free-pass: Jon Hamm.<\/p>\n
\u201cRidiculous. It\u2019s stupid. Just an utterly pointless premise,\u201d she says, defeated after yet another setback. \u201cIt\u2019s like, why?\u201d <\/p>\n
John Slattery \u2014 playing John Slattery, or at least a sadder and more comedic version of John Slattery who hasn\u2019t worked in a decade, who has taken up self-defense as a hobby and whose text messages to his former \u201cMad Men\u201d co-star go mostly unanswered \u2014 tells Deutch’s Gail that they\u2019re too far into this thing to give up now. Indeed. This is very much the spirit of this unabashedly absurd film from director David Wain, who, with his cowriter Ken Marino concluded early on that the idea was really stupid, didn’t make sense and went nowhere. For those reasons, they said, they had to make the film.<\/p>\n
In the same way Wain\u2019s \u201cWet Hot American Summer\u201d was both love letter to and send-up of the weirdness of summer camp, \u201cGail Daughtry\u201d takes on Hollywood and celebrity in a heightened and anarchic reality. Wide-eyed, never-left-Kansas Gail hasn’t even heard of the concept of the celebrity free pass at the start of the movie. Neither has her daffy high school sweetheart, but a few hours later, she\u2019s shocked to find out he\u2019s already found an occasion to use his. And thus begins her quest to find, and bang, the man who played Don Draper.<\/p>\n
Gail and her hairdresser colleague Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) pick up some companions along the way, including Marino playing a disgraced photographer whose inability to capture a candid shot of Hamm at the height of his \u201cMad Men\u201d fame sent him into a spiral of drugs and homelessness, and an eager but misguided aspiring agent played by Ben Wang. Gail isn\u2019t shy about her conquest, and her new friends don\u2019t hesitate to help. There\u2019s also a side plot involving a briefcase mix-up and an international conspiracy to take down the global financial system \u2014 don’t worry about the details, it’s mostly to set up a ridiculously violent climax.<\/p>\n
The movie stars are all a little on edge in this world. Henry Winkler half-gamely poses for a photo with a couple of goons, while Weird Al Yankovic is less than hospitable to the friendly intruders on his property, and Hamm’s bodyguard threatens unannounced guests with a strange promise: I’m going to make you sick. <\/p>\n
Impressively, \u201cGail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass\u201d was shot in Los Angeles, using the Chateau Marmont, an old Western movie set and many less picturesque locations that are all filmed with an earnestly loving wink. There\u2019s a running joke about wanting to go to Universal CityWalk, and the receptionist at their hotel in Hollywood gives them recommendations about the best coffee (Starbucks), burger (McDonald\u2019s) and home goods slash gum collection (7-Eleven) that the Hollywood Boulevard area has to offer.<\/p>\n
![\"This](\"https:\/\/www.newsday.com\/_next\/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.newsday.com%2Fimage-service%2Fversion%2Fc%3ANzJkNTdkZGQtNWNiYi00%3AYzY0ZjYzY2UtYjdmYy00%2Fcopy-of-film-review-gail-daughtry-and-the-celebrity-sex-pass.jpeg%3Ff%3DLandscape%2B16%253A9%26w%3D768%26q%3D1&w=1920&q=80\"\/)
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This image released by Sony Pictures Classics shows Zoey Deutch, left, and Miles Gutierrez-Riley in a scene from “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass.” Credit: AP\/Uncredited<\/p>\n
The only thing this movie takes seriously is its wholehearted commitment to absurdity. No idea is too dumb to explore, sometimes twice. Even when the jokes don’t land, there is still a kind of joy in it all. When Gail and Otto arrive in Los Angeles, their taxi driver (Richard Kind) cautions them, unprompted, of the dangers of thinking one can arrive in Hollywood and become Elizabeth Perkins overnight. <\/p>\n
While this critic may not have laughed out loud much (respectfully, it\u2019s no \u201cBarb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar\u201d ), I also fully enjoyed being in this refreshingly ridiculous world for 93 minutes. More dumb comedies, please. We need them.<\/p>\n
\u201cGail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,\u201d a Sony Pictures Classics release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for \u201clanguage, violence and bloody images, sexual content.\u201d Running time: 93 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.<\/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 www.newsday.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A little more than halfway through the extremely silly \u201cGail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,\u201d the main character questions the very idea behind her journey, and, by extension, the movie itself. In it, Zoey Deutch\u2019s character Gail embarks on a \u201cWizard of Oz\u201d-like journey from Kansas to Hollywood to even the score with her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2494095,"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":[21741,23032,21912,307696],"class_list":["post-2494094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-entertainment","tag-media","tag-movies","tag-wires-bot"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Movie-Review-An-absurd-trip-to-Hollywood-in-Gail-Daughtry.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2494094","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=2494094"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2494094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2494096,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2494094\/revisions\/2494096"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2494095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2494094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2494094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2494094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}