Final Rating: 3/5
Your enjoyment of this Sundance-premiering film, out in theaters now, will largely boil down to walking in with the right set of expectations. If the phrase “from the creator of Wet Hot American Summer” excites you, then you’re in the right place.
Allow me to do you the favor of offering one additional structural spoiler that took me an embarrassingly large portion of the runtime to realize (especially embarrassing for a fan of the source material and its many iterations) – and I promise this is the kind of delightful revelation that will enrich your viewing experience: David Wain’s Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a Wizard of Oz parody. Once you start to notice it, it’s a face-palm moment – after all, the Dorothy Gale of it all is right in the title.
Like that film, it features a likable protagonist from Kansas (Nouvelle Vague’s Zoey Deutch, in a wig so terrible it must be part of the joke). Said likable protagonist goes on a journey to a wondrous land over the rainbow (Los Angeles), where she picks up an assortment of oddballs who cross her path with problems of their own, but who are willing to join their personal quests to hers. Only, in this version, she seeks not to find her way home, but rather to get the bejeezus banged out of her by one celebrity by the name of Jon Hamm (Jon Hamm).
Her motive is the equally un-Dorothy-like but justifiable revenge for her fiancé’s (Michael Cassidy, The O.C.) own flagrant philandering. Nonetheless, the ode to Frank L. Baum is unmistakable, from plot touchstones to callbacks to iconic lines. (“Kill her… And her little friend, too.”) If any doubt lingers, the closing credit imagery will spell out which character is a stand-in for whom.
If it’s not the early-noughties sex-comedy pedigree that perked up your attention when you learned about this film, then it’s likely the stacked, very game cast. Deutch is joined by an ensemble including Miles Gutierrez-Riley (Agatha All Along) as her Toto, the friend from home she follows to begin this journey; Ben Wang (American Born Chinese) as an aspiring talent agent whose brain is being underutilized in his workplace decision-making; Ken Marino (Wet Hot American Summer) as a paparazzo frozen in mediocrity after a bit of bad luck led to him losing heart; and John Slattery (Mad Men) playing a sad-sack version of himself who lacks the courage to move on from his hit show with Jon Hamm that ended a decade ago.
Meanwhile, the villain side of the equation offers up the likes of Sabrina Impacciatore (The White Lotus) as a “wicked witch” with the relatable goal “to disrupt the corrupt global financial system, leaving in its place a storm of chaos and anarchy,” and Joe Lo Truglio (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) as her fumbling henchman. Not to mention cameos that run the gamut of Jennifer Aniston to “Weird Al” Yankovic. And Fred Melamed (Hail, Caesar!) ties a bow around it all as, inexplicably, a mailman who one moment narrates straight into a mailbox, at another launches into a bitter diatribe about his own problems that grows into an escalating gag that even gets its own credit scene.
This glancing summary doesn’t even scratch the surface of a barely baked plot that squeezes frothy absurdism out of an underused running gag about the “Blow Out, Blow Out” expo of hair-styling guru Remy Fontaine, inventor of the whip curl – played by Thomas Lennon (Reno 911!) as if he’s channeling 1999’s The Big Tease. Add to that an excessively gory stand-off at an abandoned Old West movie set, and dark dribbles of character lore (like a parental double-suicide) played for laughs.
It is clearly a stoner comedy, despite skirting its use on screen with a throwaway line that it’s “too expensive” in the opening, and is best experienced in a crowd, where the jokes are less likely to deflate on impact and the script’s tendency to repeatedly spell out jokes to the point of exhaustion will be less wearing. In the end, the joke is always the same: all the characters are dumb.
However, it is a film-watching experience that ages better in memory, with a rewatch leaving room to appreciate that its seeming stubborn rejection of the idea of growth and meaningfully happy endings is saved with just the right amount of last-minute reprieve from the inane nihilism of “loose and freaky” relationship nihilism. And the bright, high-contrast photography splashes the entire experience in just enough California sunshine to offer a deserved vacation from today’s too-serious world.
Thank you to Star PR and Sony Pictures Classic for the screener.
