By Dan Skip Allen 

I’m as big a fan of a good comedy as anyone. I just don’t find much funny these days. The world has made me a bit jaded. The latest comedy that premiered at this past January’s Sundance Film Festival, the last in Park City, Utah, is “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass”. It’s one of these types of comedies that has a preposterous concept, as the title suggests. These were big hits in the 90s and 2000s. Not as much the last decade and a half, though. As these kinds of films usually do this, one has a narration type element to bring the whole crazy story full circle. 

Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch) is a young hair dresser in small town Kansas. She’s been smitten with Tom Soursap McNoodleman (Michael Cassidy) ever since they were kids. They have grown up together, went to school together, and have been best friends their whole lives. Inadvertently, they give each other a celebrity hall pass. Tom’s was Jennifer Aniston, and Gail’s is Jon Hamm. While at a book signing of her cookbook, Tom takes the hall pass literally and has sex with Jennifer Aniston in the backroom of the book store. Gail sees them and decides to go to Hollywood to find Jon Hamm with her close friend Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) and fellow hairdresser. They ended up getting involved in more than they thought while they were out in California.

This film was co-written and directed by David Wain, and he captured the nature of the quirky oddball comedy so well. This reminded me of the old school Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey days. Deutch gives off vibes of those guys to some extent, but she’s not alone in her wild and crazy exploits. Even though she came to Hollywood with Otto, they can’t achieve their goal of finding and meeting up with Jon Hamm. They end up with a motley crue of a group starting off with Ben Wang who played Caleb, an ex-CAA employee, Vincent a paparazzi (Kaen Marino) and inexplicably John Slattery, from Mad Men fame. He has a connection to Hamm in exactly the way you think. This group was fun to follow along with because they all had reasons to be helping the Deutch character and their own as well.

They aren’t the only ones this movie follows along with, though. After running into Henry Winkler at the airport they end up getting their case mixed up with a couple of guys who turn out to be gangsters, Niccolo, & Sergio (Joe Lo Truglio & Mather Zickel), and what was supposed to be in their case wasn’t there and their boss Ludovica (Sabrina Impacciatore) isn’t happy about it. She takes out her anger on one of her men. She tells them she wants her case back or something bad will happen to them as well. This is a typical mix-up plot device, and it has been done to death before. I enjoyed the overall story despite this tired plot device used in the script. Also, a fish out of water scenario was used in the script, which is another overused story element. The script hasn’t done anything new with this genre.

One of the funniest parts of the story was a lot of the cameos. Like Richard Kind (Inside Out) as a cab driver or Elizabeth Banks, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Perkins, the aforementioned Aniston, and others.These people all showed up unannounced for me. I wasn’t expecting any of them. This is similarly the way Sandler or any of the other SNL alumni share their spotlight with past and present cast members from the show. Here, it seems like Wain called in a bunch of favors to industry friends to pop into this comedy he co-wrote and directed. I love a good cameo in my comedies, and this one had its fair share of them.

Besides the genre and some typical plot devices, there are two things that this film has used from decades gone by to help focus the story, and those are narration and a cool framing device. The narration is from Frank the Mailman (Fred Malamed). He is pretty funny in a candid way. He pops up from time to time throughout the film. Sometimes, he has interesting things to say about the story being told in front of our eyes and the title character. He steals the film in these moments because you don’t expect him to be so up front about the main character and her relationship. Malamed is an actor you don’t think you know until you look up his filmography and he’s been in a few good films like Hail, Ceasar, Shiva Baby and A Serious man from the Coen Brothers. He was a terrific voice-over actor for years, but now he’s made a name for himself as a legitimate character actor. He was terrific in this movie.

“Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass “ mainly focuses on finding and meeting Jon Hamm. That was a bit of a disappointment to me. I’m a big fan of Jon Hamm. “Mad Men” is one of my favorite shows of all time. Don Draper, his character in that show, is one of the greatest dramatic characters of all time. He’s fantastic in “Your Friends and Neighbors” on Apple TV. He is a terrific actor. I know he’s playing a version of himself here, but I wasn’t a fan of this breaking of the fourth wall version he’s playing. The story as a whole was a bit far-fetched, to be honest. I wanted to enjoy this film more than I did. It did have some fun elements regarding the narration/framing device, cameos, and the 90s/2000s comedy aspects, but it didn’t go to the next level, which is what I’d hoped it would.

🌟 🌟 ½