Review: Tag

How many characters are too many for an ensemble film? At a time when Ocean's 8 seems more like Ocean's 4 and the Rest, it's easy to feel that Hollywood shouldn't be allowed to make a film with more than two characters on screen at any one time. Tag largely gets around this by making the focus not the group but the mission: they're a bunch of middle-aged men still playing a schoolyard game, and that's pretty much the most interesting thing about all of them. 

Something this stupid has to be based on a true story, and so it proves to be: for one month each year, the same group of now middle-aged American men (and men only) play a game of tag that’s been going on for decades. This time though, there’s a twist: the only member of the group who’s never been tagged is getting married during the month, so for once everyone knows exactly where he’s going to be.

  

What makes this often funny film work is that it doesn’t mess around; aside from some very minor backstory for each of the core characters – Hoagie (Ed Helms), Randy (Jake Johnson), Callahan (Jon Hamm), and Sable (Hannibal Buress) with Isla Fisher as Hoagie's wife, Rashida Jones as the old flame and a hilarious turn from Jeremy Renner as the one guy who’s never been tagged – this really is just a film about grown men racing around playing tag,

In playing tag the secret to success is to keep things moving, and so this film - which barely scrapes in at 90 minutes - doesn't really linger on anything. Occasionally this cut-back approach feels like they threw away a little too much, with more than one running gag never paying off. But it's a movie where the most important thing going on is a game of tag; pretty much anything else is going to be a distraction.

Everyone is pretty much typecast here, which once again saves time (Fisher is basically playing the same character she does on those TV commercials; Buress and Johnson might very well be playing one of their previous roles in a undisclosed cross-over). Hamm is probably the stand-out, playing the most obviously grown-up character who still is totally into it; if nothing else, this is the most charming he's been in ages, and together with his Baby Driver work suggests that yeah, he really should have a real movie career sometime soon.

It's Renner's character Jerry that takes this to another level: a professional physical trainer, he's basically an unstoppable action hero, and the movie kicks into overdrive every time the rest of the crew move on him. It's this film's best joke and it's a good one; the big problem is that the other big joke - that the guys will go to any lengths to sneak up on each other - means that there are also a bunch of scenes where you're left thinking "is this real or a trick" long after the drama requires you to come down on one side or the other.

Then again, it can't be said enough: this is a movie that's about a bunch of middle aged men - men with families, with children - who take a month off to play a kid's game. Either you're going to think "isn't it great that they're able to keep their childhood selves alive, just a little" or "these middle-class white male chumps need to grow the hell up". If it's the former, congratulations: you're probably going to enjoy this. If it's the latter... well, you're definitely not alone.