Directed by David Wain | Written by Wain and Ken Marino | 93 min | ▲▲▲ | Amazon Prime
Maybe it has something to do with last summer’s revival of The Naked Gun, but the silly is really making a comeback.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a wildly broad comedy, loosely based on The Wizard Of Oz. Gail Daughtry ≠ Dorothy Gale, get it? Her best friend is Otto ≠ Toto. Clever or just really dumb, the movie commits. Gail gathers around her a number of like-minded friends, all of whom are searching something. I guess that makes Jon Hamm the Wizard. (Too bad they couldn’t get Jeff Goldblum.)
The premise is this: Gail (Zoey Deutch) is a hairdresser in small town Kansas preparing to marry her sweetheart, Tom (Michael Cassidy). They joke about their Celebrity Sex Pass, what famous person the other would be OK with them having sex with if the opportunity ever presented itself. Funny enough, this happens with Tom when Jennifer Aniston comes to town, and Gail is appalled. She runs off to LA with Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) for a hair-styling event, and there realizes the way to balance the books with Tom is to indulge in her own celebrity sex with Jon Hamm.
And this is the meat of the movie, Gail and her growing group of friends — including John Slattery playing himself — trying to locate Hamm.
This isn’t quite as goofy as The Naked Gun, to be fair, but thankfully it’s also funnier. I’d put the rate of gags that hit versus gags that miss around the same rate as the recent Stop! That! Train! In its devotion to the structure of The Wizard Of Oz, it’s strangely wholesome, but at the same time, the sex mission and foul-mouthed humour is surprisingly raunchy. How the picture has its cake and eats it too is one of the peculiar wonders on display — you wouldn’t be surprised if everyone suddenly broke into song. We also get an undercurrent of weird gags — like all the 1970s cars. It doesn’t seem to mean anything but it adds to the absurdity.
As do all the celebrity cameos, which I won’t spoil here because it’s really one of the film’s pleasures to have these game faces pop up, even when one — during a wedding scene — looks like he was photoshopped into the scene, he doesn’t even have the same lighting as the rest of the guests.
Once again, Zoey Deutch proves to be a capable lead as she did in the recent Netflix romcom Voicemails for Isabelle. Ken Marino — the co-screenwriter shows up here as a melancholy paparazzo — is a little less compelling, but the rest of the cast works hard to keep this a good time, even as it slips a bit, especially in the second act.
While I watched it I enjoyed many of its 93 minutes, which for an undemanding, quirky comedy, is not bad at all.
