Review: There’s a reason playing Tag seems too thin a premise for a film

Art: @markinternet

The profane manchild comedy has rarely been more on-the-nose than in the premise for Tag: a group of 40-something men have, since childhood, gone to absurd lengths in order to spend every May playing the titular playground game with each other. What started as a presumably charming tradition has become a mandatory annual reunion for them—one that ignores geography and circumstance in the cause of keeping their friendships and inner kid alive. Tag’s conceit is cute enough that it’s no wonder the movie rights to the Wall Street Journal article it’s based on sold within a month; it’s such a readymade Will Ferrell vehicle, it’s no wonder such an inordinately strong comic ensemble stepped in once Ferrell vacated. But it’s also centered on such an insipid, immediately-tiresome game that it’s no wonder it so closely resembles its inspiration.

Unencumbered by anything as fussy as a fluid narrative, Tag‘s lazy opening finds Hoagie (Ed Helms) and Bob (Jon Hamm) explaining their decades-old game to audience-surrogate/reporter Rebecca (Annabelle Wallis, seemingly busted down from love interest to exposition device) after one gets a janitorial job at the other’s company solely to tag him. The dogged ends to which these idiots will go to in the name of “You’re it!” now established, the trio round up friends with such deep-cut American Gladiators names as Chilli (Jake Johnson) and Sable (Hannibal Buress) and head to the Pacific Northwest wedding of Jerry (Jeremy Renner)—who plans to retire from the game following his nuptials with Susan (datedly harpy-mode Leslie Bibb). After amendments to existing bylaws (the seriousness with which they take tag is a running, run-aground gag), the five pals agree to not disrupt any wedding-related event, forcing them to get creative in pursuit of finally tagging the never-been-It, superhumanly-slippery Jerry. That’s right: the entire point of the movie is to touch Hawkeye.

Tag should’ve been halfway amusing considering the natural comedic talent at its core (it has even more gimme ringers than the similarly-bent Game Night), but Jeff Tomsic (a television director of such small-screen ambition that his dearth of style makes Paul Feig look visually nuanced) utterly wastes them by leaning on one-note roles indistinct from anything else they’ve done. In other words, yes, Johnson is rage-filled and intoxicated; yes, Helms is affably, angrily high-strung; and so on. The characters are such vague, chemistry-free banter machines that their forced tight-knit bond is only ever proven by how often they vocally insist upon it—especially in the case of Renner. An enigma within the cast, Renner’s off-putting, overly-competitive, pathological liar touts his ability to keep a distance from the men he’s called friends for 30 years. Why the other four continue to put up with this bizarrely-coiffed douche is a mystery Tag never solves.

Hamm and Johnson are defined by a vestigial love triangle with lust-object/void Cheryl (a wasted Rashida Jones), while the only modicum of dimension afforded Buress is a quickly-forgotten trip to his therapist (Carrie Brownstein, one of a handful of other blown cameos). As the ostensible lead, Helms gets a little more to go on—including, unfortunately, a sitcom-ready, eleventh-hour emotional mea culpa—but even he admits that his wife (Isla Fisher) is way more committed to Tag than he is. Thanks in no small part to the strained wheel-spinning around her, Fisher enjoys her most standout performance since Wedding Crashers. (Fittingly, like that 2005 farce, Tag relegates a nifty concept to first act montages before mostly abandoning it in favor of overwrought marital hijinks for the remainder. And how she again crashes a wedding.)

Tag’s little go-nowhere stabs at characterization and side plots are bungled by being both too numerous and too half-assed. What of Johnson’s father/roommate and oft-mentioned ex-wife? Why does Hamm disappear with Jones for a huge stretch before lying (SO MUCH LYING) about calling Beijing? What about poor Steve Berg of Drunk History, who just wants to play the game too? These little oopsies might be excused if Tag were more than just sporadically funny. Blame it on the undisciplined Tomsic (and a pair of screenwriters who can only boast the Waiting… films between them) who, in egregiously post-Apatowian fashion, favors sweaty, painfully improvised business to the point of structural flabbiness, repeatedly trotting out the following as if they were in no way played-out comic bits: ’90s hip hop underscoring middle class squares acting tough; smugly-narrated, slow motion fights (à la Sherlock Holmes); and panicked Snorricam (à la Requiem for a Dream) chase scenes.

Favorably, Tag occasionally resembles a Todd Phillips picture, but only in that it’s so high on its own zaniness that it doesn’t bother to ever get full-on zany; in terms of Phillips’ output with Helms specifically, it’s maybe only a little funnier than The Hangover Part III. Tag would’ve benefited from jokes that weren’t so relentlessly binary: grown men playing tag but shot like an action film, or, inherently funny actors vamping in the absence of better scripted dialogue. Both get old so quickly that but a scant few winners can squeak by—like a particularly dark exchange between a furiously outraged Johnson and a mortified Hamm. It’s a genuine shame that this troupe of welcome comic presences were saddled with something so inert, and so symptomatic of everything wrong with the glut of R-rated funny-adults-behaving-like-children fuckarounds. The gormless Tag is an embarrassing waste of talent. But at least it’s as forgettably inconsequential as the game itself.

Grade: D

Tag
Director: Jeff Tomsic
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures/New Line Cinema
Runtime: 100 minutes
Rating: R
Cast: Ed Helms, Jake Johnson, Annabelle Wallis, Hannibal Buress, Isla Fisher, Rashida Jones, Leslie Bibb, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner

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