Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass

Grade: B

I recently took Zoe Deutch to task for her performance in Voicemails for Isabelle. Her unrelenting over-the-top acting style clashed with what that film was trying to do. I didn’t like that movie, nor did I like her in it. With Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, both the film and her performance are a success. Once I recognized and accepted the filmmakers’ intent, I was on board with it. Deutch does the same thing here as in Voicemails for Isabelle – but this time around, it’s a perfect performance for the material.

A Celebrity Sex Pass (also known as a Celebrity Hall Pass or Free Pass) is a hypothetical agreement in a couple that allows each partner to hook up with one pre-designated celebrity crush of theirs, without it counting as cheating. It’s always fun, and feels safe, to talk about this when you’ll probably never meet the person, but what if you actually did? I wonder if that’s ever happened. It happens here.

Deutch plays Gail, who is engaged to Tom (Michael Cassidy). A few weeks before the wedding, she catches him getting it on with his Celebrity Sex Pass (Jennifer Aniston, playing herself). Gail, a hairdresser, is about to travel to Los Angeles with her friend and co-worker Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley, from Sweethearts and Smile 2) for a convention. While there, she makes it her quest to even the score, by locating and doing the deed with her Celebrity Sex Pass: Jon Hamm.

There is a madcap farcical zaniness that is sustained throughout, as one by one, more people join the cause in getting Gail laid by her favorite Mad Men star. The ever-growing team includes the likes of an aspiring young agent (Ben Wang, from The Long Walk, Karate Kid: Legends, and Mean Girls), a paparazzi photographer who has never managed to capture a shot of Hamm, and even Hamm’s Mad Men co-star John Slattery. You could liken it to Dorothy on the yellow brick road, picking up the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion along the way.

The cinematography has sunny, bold, bright primary colors, giving it a vibe akin to the suburban neighborhoods in The Truman Show and The Stepford Wives. Deutch delivers all of her lines, even the raunchy ones, with the cute pluckiness of a Disney Channel heroine. The one-liners, recurring jokes, and sight gags are often very funny. If there’s one you don’t care for, there’s another several coming right up. I haven’t even talked about the narrator. Fred Melamed breaks the fourth wall to act as our tour guide for the story. He’s a mailman. There’s one scene where the camera is inside a mailbox, looking out at him providing narration to us – then it cuts to outside, as a confused, curious passerby wonders why this man has his face buried in a mailbox, and who he’s talking to.

We eventually see Jon Hamm himself, and he’s clearly having a ball playing the version of himself the movie gives him. My favorite celebrity cameo is the person in the last scene, just sitting among the extras, never saying anything. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass worked for me because it never wavered from the ridiculous motif it establishes. It commits to the bit, and I had a fun time. It simultaneously embraces and lampoons numerous movie cliches.

Grade: B