Playboy film critic Stephen Rebello reviews 'Tag,' the Jeremy Renner and Ed Helms summer comedy
Summer’s here, so this must be time for The Hangover’s Ed Helms in a dumb, rude, occasionally sentimental R-rated movie about 40-ish boy-men man-boys run amok. Tag, based on a true story by Russell Adams published in 2013 in the Wall Street Journal, stars Helms, Jon Hamm, Jake Johnson Hannibal Buress and Jeremy Renner as a pack of middle-aged Peter Pans who’ve never quite progressed beyond the game of tag they played together since they were kids.
To prove the point—and to keep their sense of play and friendship alive—the Tag Brothers meet yearly every May to continue the game for one full week. Only now, they’ve amped up the gamesmanship, making it exponentially more elaborate and ambitious, involving wives, other friends, crazy costumes, cross-country trips, lies, cheating, property-trashing and more than a touch of cruelty.
The script by Rob McKittrick and Mark Stellan kicks into gear when the guys’ martial arts-expert gym-owner pal Jerry (Renner), never once tagged in nearly 30 years at the game and thus “the greatest player who ever lived,” announces his voluntary retirement. With the undefeated tag ninja due to marry his fiancée (Leslie Bibb, giving it the shrill, full-throttle bridezilla treatment) in the picturesque Pacific Northwest, the gang (joined by a very good Isla Fisher playing Helms’ manic, super intense, Wedding Crashers-redux wife) decide to pull out all the stops and finally wreak havoc on the cocky, almost mythical Jerry, wedding or not.
Tag only comes to life when the very funny Jon Hamm, Jake Johnson and Isla Fisher make glorious fools of themselves.
Along to document the gang’s hijinks is a Wall Street Journal reporter played by Annabelle Wallis. Big-screen newbie Jeff Tomsic directed the occasionally funny, defiantly stupid flick, which, at base, is mostly a string of scenes in which white, privileged arrested development-stricken guys run, fall, chase, sabotage and make utter asses of each other, for the joy of yelling, “You’re it!” But the characters and situations eventually become so grotesque that the basic material has all the makings of a much, much better, savage satiric dark comedy, or one hell of a Deliverance-esque horror comedy of warped masculinity—either one of them rated a hard R.
Instead, it plays nasty, then winks at the audience and just wants to charm, not entertain and say something dark and funny about men and competition. True, the movie occasionally pokes its snout down darker, more interesting alleyways, including passing references to recovery from addictions, bitter relationship disillusion, the specters of ill health and death and the idea that the games are the glue that helps hold the group together and helps them feel forever young.
But mostly, this thing plods along lazily, throwing random punchlines, comic improvs and tired ideas against the wall, only coming to life when the very funny Hamm, Johnson and Fisher make glorious fools of themselves, or the criminally underused Hannibal Burress mumbles and deadpans the movie’s only smart, funny dialogue. If you’re up for the ragtag, patchy, catch-as-catch-can comedy stylings of Tag, go to it. These terrific, goofball actors deserve way better. And so do we.