Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass review – silly, scattershot Hollywood comedy

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There’s been the expected amount of heavy-weighted seriousness at this year’s Sundance – stories about sexual assault, climate change, opioid addiction and dementia – but also a remarkable amount of silliness. Perhaps realising we might be in desperate need of an uplift, the festival has given us a cartoonish dom-sub romance, a killer Barney horror, a pop star mockumentary, a Weekend at Bernie’s art world caper and a film where Olivia Colman shags a man made of wicker. But those films are all pretty stern-minded in comparison to David Wain’s disposable, dopey comedy Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, a film without a single serious moment, driven by the sole purpose of making us laugh.

It succeeds in fits and starts – I laughed more than I have at many a comedy in the past year – but its wild, scattershot humour is so hit and miss, too many jokes going nowhere, that it’s not quite the rousing win I wanted it to be. Wain has previously toyed with more conventional studio comedies like Wanderlust and Role Models (which for me was one of the best examples of the form in the 2000s) and spoofs, targeting 80s sex comedies with Wet Hot American Summer and romcoms with They Came Together. Gail Daughtry belongs in the latter group but it doesn’t have quite as direct of an aim, a Wizard of Oz-inspired, Hollywood-set action comedy about marriage, fame, espionage and the burning desire to have sex with Jon Hamm.

He’s the celebrity Gail (Zoey Deutch) would most want to sleep with if she was allowed to, a topic she’d never even thought about before, a small-town woman with small-town dreams. But when her fiance has sex with his pick Jennifer Aniston at a book-signing event for her absurdly simple cookbook, Gail is determined to get her own back and heads to Hollywood with her closest friend Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley). After a briefcase mix-up, their quest intersects with a sinister megalomaniac (Sabrina Impacciatore, doing her thing) and her unspecific nefarious plan.

Along the way Gail and Otto pick up an ambitious but incompetent wannabe agent (Ben Wang), a has-been paparazzo (Ken Marino) and an out-of-work John Slattery (John Slattery) as they hunt down Hamm while running from goons.

It’s all deeply, knowingly silly and inconsequential, the kind of film that feels like it was cobbled together last minute as a lark between friends (Wain stuffs his film with actors he’s worked with before) and one imagines the laugh quotient might be considerably higher for those considerably closer to Wain’s world. But it’s so fast and frantic, leaping along from a so-so joke to a far better one, that it’s hard not to have some low-level fun watching it. There’s a scattering of genuinely amusing bits involving Hamm’s assistant, played by a standout Tobie Windham, and his bizarre backstory, threats to make people feel “very sick” and the repeated slam of a foot in the door, an eventually paid-off gag about Elizabeth Perkins, an all-hands-on-deck head in a soup gag and a hotel receptionist’s ridiculous tourist recommendations.

But the rushed feel of the film, which looks like it was shot with the budget of a mid-awards show sketch, means that there are so many lines or often extended sequences that feel a few drafts away from something far funnier. I wanted more detail to some of the asides or some more effectively absurdist silliness, so often the choices feeling lazy or underdeveloped. Without a clearer target, other than a goofy riff on The Wizard of Oz or maybe a poke at the many awful action comedies of the last decade or so, there’s an aimlessness to it, a parody that’s not really parodying anything in particular.

Everyone is committed to the bit though, whatever the bit might actually be, and the fun that they’re all having is infectious enough to sweep us along too. It’s been a big Sundance for sex comedies, from the good (Olivia Wilde’s hilarious couple-swapping comedy The Invite) to the mid (Gregg Araki’s Gen Z vs millennial romp I Want Your Sex) to the bafflingly generic (Iliza Schlesinger’s dreadful by-the-numbers misfire Chasing Summer), and Gail can proudly be named the silliest. She’s just about worth tagging along with although it’s probably a journey you’ll forget you ever went on.