We don’t stop playing games because we grow up, we grow up because we stop playing games. So goes the mantra as (over) repeated by man-child Hogan, ringleader to a gang of grown men who spend the entire month of May trying to best each other at a competitive game of Tag. When Jerry (Jeremy Renner) announces that he’s quitting at the end of the season, Hogan, Callahan (Jon Hamm), Sable (Hannibal Buress) and Chilli (Jake Johnson) make it their mission to Tag their pal before it’s too late.
Coming hot on the heels of Game Night, this is another violent, crude R-rated comedy with an all-star cast. The stakes are relatively high (in that people could actually die), the jokes near-the-knuckle, and much of the dialogue has an air of improvisation. Ed Helms takes a torrent of physical abuse, some guy is stoned the whole time, and the action is directed with Blockbuster-level sheen. We’re just a dismemberment or two short of the full Hangover.
Too often, however, these high-concept action comedies tend to forget that it wasn’t just the violence and the occasionally shocking brutality which made The Hangover popular. Like so many before it, Tag leans into the meanness, bone-crunching violence and ritual humiliation of Ed Helms, depicting its five ‘friends’ as a gang of awful sociopaths. Banter and rough play can certainly be an integral part of male friendship, but never once do we buy these people as being friends outside of their game, nor is there a sense of shared affection between any of them.
Which is a big problem when the chips are down and director Jeff Tomsic tries to sell Tag as being about something more than a game of Tag. Its emotional peak is unearned and unbelievable, any attempt at pathos spurious and facile. Its ultimate central message is accidental: this friendship group is a grossly toxic one, each of these men bringing out the worst in the others. Frankly, Jerry should be happy to be getting away from it all.
Were this just another Happy Madison Netflix joint, no-one would think twice of it. But the stellar cast gathered here make Tag a tremendous waste of talent. The commitment of Ed Helms and screen wife Isla Fisher is to be commended, but the film is undeserving; Jon Hamm is likeable but miscast, having wandered in from a different movie entirely. Meanwhile, Hannibal Buress steals the show while never once feeling like a member of his own ensemble. Jeremy Renner’s hair and physicality do all of the hard work there, and Jake Johnson’s Chilli is a horrible annoyance (his tone, demeanour and look suggesting that they were hoping for Jason Mantzoukas instead). The women hardly fare much better, wasting Rashida Jones and underwriting the journalist character to the point of insignificance.
There are some fleeting laughs, but they become lost in the lengthy, sullen periods without humour and forgotten by the time we limp into the tonally broken, bizarrely depressing finale. The end credits sequence suggests that, in this case, the true story behind Tag is far more entertaining than the one they filmed.
Tag – you’re shit.
TAG /CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: JEFF TOMSIC / SCREENPLAY: ROB MCKITTRICK, MARK STEILEN / STARRING: ED HELMS, JEREMY RENNER, LIL REL HOWERY, JON HAMM / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Expected Rating: 7 out of 10
