FILM REVIEW
GAIL DAUGHTRY AND THE CELEBRITY SEX PASS
Rated R
94 Minutes
Released July 10th
Generally, in the first 10 minutes of a movie, you need your audience to buy into its realm and the characters who inhabit it. Well, this movie gets off to a somewhat shattered start. The first few scenes made me wonder if I’d walked into a screening session for a Beginning Filmmaking 101 class. In those opening minutes, the actors, even the fabulous Zoey Deutsch, who plays the titular character, seemed forced, their timing a bit off, too over-the-top. The sets were static and mundane, and the cast didn’t seem to be connecting with each other. Even the extras seemed to be mimicking their characters. I wondered if I was about to waste 93 minutes.
But wait! Turns out that’s just the style of director/writer David Wain and his writing partner Ken Marino. With backgrounds in sketch comedy, they embrace tongue-in-cheek, loosely structured satire, poking fun at the movie business and celerity-on-a-pedestal phenomenon. I wish I’d known that going in, though. If you can drag yourself through the first few minutes and catch on to the sketch comedy style of the film, it gets fun. The well-cast ensemble starts to feel each other and play with one another as the film goes on, and by the end, the slapstick on screen is being enjoyed as much by the audience as it is by the cast.
Wain and Marino are prolific comedy writers, best known for the Wet Hot American Summer movie franchise that began in 2001. That first film launched what would become immense careers for some of its cast of then relatively unknown actors, including Paul Rudd (who has a cameo in Gail Daughtry), Christopher Meloni, Molly Shannon, Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, and Elizabeth Banks. Several of the cast from that 2001 film are in the Gail Daughtry ensemble, including Marguerite Moreau, Kerri Kenny, Jo Lo Truglio, and John Slattery. Jon Hamm, the “celebrity star” of Gail Daughtry, was in Wain’s TV series Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp in 2015.
Note to director Wain – in my humble opinion, those first few scenes that set up the plot could have been re-shot, after the cast had developed that wonderful camaraderie that they displayed later in the film. That would have brought people like me, who are not Wet Hot American Summer experts, into the story immediately. Later in the film, the rapport the cast had developed and the slapstick comedy that they got right on the nose, was jumping of the screen and embracing the audience. Their antics and the fun they were having with each other, including Mad Men alums Hamm and Slattery playing goofball sidekicks, is real enough to light up the movie. Hamm seems to show up in everything lately, in a wide variety of roles – no pigeonhole typecasting problem for him.
The movie is really carried on the shoulders of its two stars, who have not worked with Wain and Marino before, Zoey Deutsch and Ben Wang. Deutsch is the daughter of actress Lea Thompson and director Howard Deutsch. She has put in the work to build her own career, first appearing on TV in the early 2010’s in Disney’s The Suite Life on Deck and later in an impressive list of TV series and films. She recently played actress “Jean Seberg” in the film Nouvelle Vague and starred in the TV movie Voicemails for Isabelle. Here she proves her skill with great comedic timing.
At 28, Wang is already an accomplished actor and martial artist. He starred in Karate Kid: Legends opposite Jackie Chan in 2025 and on the sitcom American Born Chinese in 2023. He was born in Beijing and immigrated with his family to Minnesota when he was six. He went on to study musical theatre at NYU. Wang also shows here that he has great comedic intuition, as a high-powered, youthful talent agent “Caleb,” who’s thirsting for his first big client.
The theme of this movie is a send-up of our tendency to put celebrities on a pedestal and feel they are not real. It’s about the ridiculousness of the high plateau to which we elevate stars when we see something in their performance that we aspire to. I’m glad I stayed past the first few minutes. Sometimes even the greatest artists start their monologue or song not quite getting into their projection to the audience immediately, but as they continue to float the words on the music, a light seems to come from within and give it life. So it is with this film. It’s worth seeing.
Kathryn Whitney Boole has spent most of her life in the entertainment industry, which has been the backdrop for remarkable adventures with extraordinary people. She is a Talent Manager with Studio Talent Group in Santa Monica. kboole@gmail.com.
