Tag stars Ed Helms, Jon Hamm, Jake Johnson, Hannibal Buress and Jeremy Renner as five grown adults playing the same game of tag for one month out of the year, every year, for nearly 30 years. It sounds like a ridiculous premise, but somehow it is based on a true story! Four of these friends team up to ambush the fifth (Jerry) at his wedding, as he has never been tagged and this might be the last year they get to play the game.
I went in to this film with almost zero expectations, knowing that this would be a low-brow comedy with obvious humor and cliched writing. And that’s what I got. But the nice thing about going in with zero expectations is that there’s nowhere to go but up, and this film was not the complete disaster I thought it would be!
To the writers’ credit, they understand how silly the setup is. Grown men playing tag? It’s a clever concept, but can we really make a feature length, believable movie out of it? The way they accomplished this was by not shying away from how silly the game is, and in fact using it as a plot device (growing out of your childish behaviors). The film works as a middle-aged comedy because it highlights a common insecurity or desire among men that age: the desire to return to the playground days, of running around care-free and abandoning real-life responsibility if only for a while. The writers played into this perfectly without ever trying to get too “serious,” which would have seriously bogged this film down. The characters may take the game seriously, but we don’t take them seriously, if that makes sense.
I also liked the metaphor of the game as a means of drawing people together, as they are literally out looking for each other. As one of the characters says in a sentimental scene (paraphrasing), “The game isn’t about staying apart, it’s about finding excuses to come together.” The quest to tag Jerry isn’t just a childhood pursuit; it’s also a quest to reconnect with a long-lost friend who has grown distant from the group over the years. Jerry himself even seems to misunderstand the point of the game: he takes pride in his flawless record, not realizing that the idea is to stay close with others, not isolate yourself for fear of losing. It’s campy, sure, but his character arc was a smart decision to focus on as the emotional heart of the film.
The film is also just a lot of fun! There were some good “action” sequences involving the actual game being played, and while there are the usual trappings of physical humor (face slapping, butt jokes, characters getting injured in ridiculous ways), there was enough cleverness going out to balance it out. The slow-mo scenes with Jerry in particular were great, emphasizing just how ahead of the game he is, analyzing every move like he’s Neo seeing the Matrix for the first time. The cat-and-mouse charade was generally well-conceived, if a little silly, though some sequences (the golf cart chase scene among others) were clearly designed just to generate some set pieces and keep the audience entertained. In some respects that’s true of the whole film, but I digress.
The film is not without its flaws, of course. Some of the character development is pretty shoddy. Every member of the core group is given one or two key attributes, which are then beaten into us over and over. While I liked the arcs of both Hogan and Jerry, the others are fairly simplistic: Chilli likes to smoke weed and that’s basically all he does, Sable has mental health issues that are briefly mentioned and then glossed over, and Bob is a successful businessman with no real personality of his own. Isla Fisher’s Anna has some fun quirks, namely that she has anger/intensity issues, but she’s the only non-core character with any semblance of development. Leslie Bibb plays Jerry’s fiance, and she’s inconsistent throughout the whole movie, as we’re never sure exactly where she stands on the game as it changes from scene to scene. A few characters pop in for pure comic relief, which is fine, but there was potential for a much stronger supporting cast. And then there’s a bizarre love triangle with Rashida Jones’s character that goes absolutely nowhere. It began as a manifestation of the competition between Chilli and Bob, then it became a sappy romance for some reason, then it was dropped completely from the plot with no explanation. WTF?!
While the humor mostly lands, it’s your typical juvenile mainstream comedy. Lots of dick jokes, weed jokes, and physical slapstick. I do love me some Hannibal Buress, and he delivers some of the best one-liners of the film, but almost all of them were in the trailer! I hate when a film basically gives away the entire movie in the trailer, but that seems to be the way of the world nowadays. The amount of plot whiplash with the trickery of the game was also a bit extreme; the cat-and-mouse game seeks to make us unsure if what’s happening is real, like when Jerry’s fiance fakes a miscarriage to get him out of a jam. It was fun for a while, but it takes away some of the emotional impact because we’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like in the big sentimental reveal that Hogan has a deadly tumor, we’re still unsure if this is a ruse because the game’s still happening.
As a craft, the film is fine though a bit messy at times. The way the slow-mo sequences were shot was clever, with stark contrast lighting and hyper-realism to highlight the absurdity of the situation. There was some shoddy editing and awkward framing that is typical of a comedy film with lots of improv and undoubtedly several reshoots/inserts. It’s subtle enough that the average moviegoer won’t notice, but for a film connoisseur like myself, it’s a bit distracting. The set design was good, at least, and no complaints about lighting or anything else like that. It may sound pedantic, but usually in movies like this I seek out that kind of thing like a hawk (see my Chappaquiddick review for why). The fact that immersion was never explicitly broken is often taken for granted because filmmakers are so good at it now, but hey, when there’s not much else to praise, props where they’re due.
Conclusion
You know what you’re getting with Tag, and there’s really not a whole lot to say as a result. Not bad, but not good either. It’s slightly better than we all expected such a movie to be, so if you’re into this style of humor, you’ll probably enjoy it. If you’re not, don’t feel bad about skipping it.
VERDICT: C
-AD
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Scriptophile 