Formula: (Ocean's 11 - Heat) * Horrible Bosses
After I finished pitching one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs. He finally said, “Yeah, but we’re really trying to focus on movies about board games. People really seem to respond to those.”For the rest of the meeting, we talked about whether there was any potential in a movie called “Yahtzee!” I made some polite suggestions and left.
Yeah, they turned the game of Tag - the simplest
game in the world - into a movie. We all laugh at The Angry Birds Movie or The Emoji
Movie, but now the studios have gone too far. Right? Yet, the more I
thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn't such a dumb idea. First of
all, on a technicality, it's actually based on the true story of a group of
friends who kept a multi-state game of tag going for decades. It was made into
an enormously popular Wall Street Journal article.
So, there is sort of more to it than, say,
Battleship. More
importantly, Tag is actually a great idea. You know where a lot of comedies run
into problems? Plot. So many comedies have a third act scramble where they
force in a lot of plot and forget about the jokes. Comedies have gotten better
about this in the last decade, but it's still a major problem. Well, Tag is a
simple game. The story doesn't need much. Just make the individual tags
escalate and you can do just about anything you want with the rest of the time.
It's actually a terrific premise.
Similar to the real-life story, Tag is about
a group of five friends in their early 40s*. They've been playing the same game
of Tag every May since they were 9. One day, Hoagie (Ed Helms) tags Bob (Jon
Hamm) while he's in the middle of a interview with the Wall Street Journal. He
also brings news that Jerry (Jeremy Renner) says he's retiring after this year.
He convinces Bob to come with him as he gathers the other players - divorced
stoner Chili (Jake Johnson) and also recently dumped Kevin (Hannibal Buress) -
to change Jerry's mind. Oh, the Wall Street Journal reporter, Rebecca
(Annabelle Wallis), is intrigued by this and joins along. Hoagie's wife, Anna
(Isla Fisher) joins as well. She is crazy intense about the game even though
only the five friends are technically in the game. They return to their
hometown in Spokane, WA where Jerry still lives. Oh yeah, in over 30 years,
Jerry has never been tagged. His wedding is scheduled May 31st (which is why
none of the five friends were invited). There are a few other complications.
Jerry's fiance (Leslie Bibb) is annoyed by this game and doesn't want it
ruining the wedding weekend. The woman who Bob and Chili liked in high school,
Cheryl (Rashida Jones), shows up too.
*The actor ages are 44, 47, 40, 35, 47. Average is
42.6. Round it down to 42 to factor in when they filmed it.
Remember how I mentioned that the beauty of Tag as a
movie was the simplicity? Well, they kind of went overboard filling it up with
other things. I liked enough of the individual complications that it didn't
bother me that much. However, the end result has a little too much going on.
I laughed a lot watching this, because at its core, Tag
is an excuse for a lot of actors to be really goofy for 2 hours. It's an
interesting mix of actors too. It's hard to think of a bigger comedy fanboy in
Hollywood than Jon Hamm. I still don't know if he has comedy chops, but he
makes up for it with his willingness to do anything if he thinks it can get a
laugh. Ed Helms excels at playing characters who you'd think would be the
straight man but aren't. Johnson and Buress are the only guys in the cast who
can get a laugh out of any meterial. They know how they are funny and how to
use that for a laugh. Jeremy Renner only really works in this because, as the
world's best tag player, they basically make him his character from The Bourne Legacy
and give him an internal dialogue to show how he strategizes in real time.
Because of this, Renner is pretty great. Isla Fisher has a great time going
nuts. Rashida Jones feels underused as a straight woman, but she's good at it.
Annabelle Wallis is a complete nothing in this. She only exists so the guys can
give occasional explanations about the game. Leslie Bibb could've had more to
do as well. Some of that was by design for her character.
Now it's time for the tricky part of this reaction.
I have to explain why the movie doesn't work without sounding like I'm
completely humorless. The movie is funny and I laughed a lot. It's good for one
viewing. It's not a movie I intend to see again though. That's because the
movie has no idea that its characters are all assholes. These guys ruin every
event they go to for everyone else involved. They cause thousands of dollars in
property damage. I would hate to be around them. There's a whole sequence
involving an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that goes too far for me to like any
of these characters still. The problem is this is based on a true story, and
the filmmakers want to be respectful to the actual guys this was about. So, it
has to pretend that all the characters in the movie are nice guys. They
occasionally apologize when they knock someone over or break into their house.
They make the occasional speech suggesting "maybe we've gone too
far". But then they continue to do the same things and the film cheers
them on for it. The movie confuses the difference between a good friendship and
a friendship between good people. It's going for the latter when it should be
going for the former. As an audience, we only need to understand why these
characters would be friends with each other. That's what we respond to: a good
friendship. We don't need to come away thinking that we want to be friends with
those characters. That's what the movie is going for and that's where it runs into
problems.
Tag isn't a great comedy
movie. It's a mediocre movie with some good laughs. I'll see just about
anything with a cast this good that wants to make me laugh. So many mediocre
comedies don't even manage to make me laugh. In that respect, Tag is a
considerable success. It's not a movie I would fault anyone for skipping, but I
had a good time.
Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend
OK, the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. That was quite
the clusterfuck, wasn't it? Really, it is a fascinating scene. It starts with
the guys crashing an AA meeting. That's not cool on its own. Then they disrupt
the meeting (let's ignore the fire hazard of blocking all the exits). This
disruption ends with Jerry breaking a stained glass window (those aren't cheap).
They trap Jerry in the kitchen. His fiance barges in and appears to be having a
miscarriage from the stress. The fascinating part is how the filmmakers handle
that. Most of the guys are playing the "nice guy" card. They have
concern for her and let Jerry go. Again, this is after they've crashed an AA
meeting, so they've already given up any chance at gaining the moral high
ground. Chili has a cringe-inducing set of lines about wishing for a
miscarriage which the other guys rightfully balk at. This gets complicated
after the fact by it turning out to actually be a hoax set up by Jerry and his
fiance as an emergency plan. The movie has no way of navigating this. They've
backed themselves into a corner where the guys need to either be unrepentant
assholes or have a real "come to
Jesus" moment. Neither of those happen.
Oh, and I was not aware at all about how Jeremy
Renner broke his arms 3 days into filming this, so I wasn't looking for all the
ways that covered that up. I'm kind of glad about that, because it would've
been very distracting.
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