A little more than halfway through the extremely silly “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” the main character questions the very idea behind her journey, and, by extension, the movie itself. In it, Zoey Deutch’s character Gail embarks on a “Wizard of Oz”-like journey from Kansas to Hollywood to even the score with her fiance and have sex with her celebrity free-pass: Jon Hamm.
“Ridiculous. It’s stupid. Just an utterly pointless premise,” she
says, defeated after yet another setback. “It’s like, why?”
John Slattery — playing John Slattery, or at least a sadder and more comedic version of John Slattery who hasn’t worked in a decade, who has taken up self-defense as a hobby and whose text messages to his former “Mad Men” co-star go mostly unanswered — tells Deutch's Gail that they’re 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.
In the same way Wain’s “Wet Hot American Summer” was both love letter to and send-up of the weirdness of summer camp, “Gail Daughtry” 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’s shocked to find out he’s already found an occasion to use his. And thus begins her quest to find, and bang, the man who played Don Draper.
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 “Mad Men” fame sent him into a spiral of drugs and homelessness, and an eager but misguided aspiring agent played by Ben Wang. Gail isn’t shy about her conquest, and her new friends don’t hesitate to help. There’s also a side plot involving a briefcase mix-up and an international conspiracy to take down the global financial system — don't worry about the details, it's mostly to set up a ridiculously violent climax.
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.
Impressively, “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” 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’s 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’s) and home goods slash gum collection (7-Eleven) that the Hollywood Boulevard area has to offer.
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.
While this critic may not have laughed out loud much (respectfully, it’s no “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” ), I also fully enjoyed being in this refreshingly ridiculous world for 93 minutes. More dumb comedies, please. We need them.
“Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” a Sony Pictures Classics release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “language, violence and bloody images, sexual content.” Running time: 93 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
