‘Gail Daughtry And The Celebrity Sex Pass’ review: Zoey Deutsch heads limp LA-set sex parody

Dir: David Wain. US. 2026. 93mins

Hairdresser Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutsch) is an innocent Sandra Dee-type living in small town Kansas, and just two weeks away from marrying her high school sweetheart. That’s until an ill-advised conversation about the one celebrity they would each allow the other to have sex with is taken literally by him – a move that marks the first in a series of starry cameos in David Wain’s largely low brow, slapstick-laced parody in The Naked Gun mold. After Gail heads to Los Angeles with her gay hairdressing buddy Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), she decides the best solution would be to get her own back, which means locating and sleeping with Jon Hamm.

The quality to quantity ratio of the jokes is lower than it ought to be

This is the start of the latest romp from Wain and his regular collaborator Ken Marino and marks the fifth film he’s taken to Sundance, where the film bows in Premires, including They Came Together! and Wet Hot American Summer. Very loosely riffing on The Wizard of Oz, the flimsy narrative just about holds together but the jokes, while plentiful, often feel like rehashes of something the Zucker Brothers did better decades ago. Wain has an existing fanbase who should find this appealing but it’s debatable whether he’ll win over many new converts – especially outside of the US, given the very specific LA insider nature of many of the gags.

As Gail and Otto – the anagram of Toto surely no mistake – set about their quest, they quickly acquire a crew, including the smart-witted artists’ agency assistant Caleb (Ben Wang), paparazzo Vincent (Marino), who wears his heart on his sleeve, and Hamm’s Mad Men co-star John Slattery, playing a version of himself who may be handy with a boxing move but has little courage in life. What they don’t realise is that a briefcase mix-up at the airport has led Sabrina Impacciatore’s megalomaniac ‘witch’ to set a couple of wise guys (Mather Zickel and Joe Lo Truglio) on their tail.

Deutsch, who brought peppy star quality to Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, continues to impress as innocent abroad Gail, a tone that is matched by Gutierrez-Riley’s equally heightened performance, and the best of the jokes stem from the contrast between this naivety and the sex Gail is seeking. Hamm and Slattery have fun sending themselves up and a long line of other familiar faces, including Henry Winkler, Weird Al Jankovic and Richard Kind, show up for a punchline or two – but there’s a nagging suspicion that they are having more fun than the audience.

The quality to quantity ratio of the jokes is lower than it ought to be, with many sketched rather than fully developed, although a nicely worked piece of wordplay focused on the Wright Brothers gives a taste of what might have been. Voiceover veteran Fred Melamed also gets some enjoyable mileage out of a narrator role but, after being nicely set up and getting the best sight gag in the film, is all but forgotten for much of the running time. Wain and Marino have a tendency to milk a joke, which proves unfortunate when it was barely funny the first time. All of which is not helped by a baggy narrative that, despite its Wizard of Oz template, feels structurally weak.

Other humour could have been drafted in from the early 2000s while the slapstick also tends towards the tried and tested, including an inevitable boot to the groin and one character getting repeatedly punched – although, perhaps there are those who will lap up the familiarity while insisting the old ones are still the best.