Tag

2018 action comedy

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Adults continue a game of tag they've been playing for decades.

The guy sitting next to me at the theater kept giving me a side-eye and then leaning forward in his seat with his head in his hands. I'm pretty sure he didn't like the way I smelled. Of course, he might have been annoyed when I took off my socks during the previews. Either way,  I might have ruined his theater experience. I thought about apologizing at the end but decided against it. I also thought about tagging him on the way out and darting out of the theater, but I didn't do that either.

This is "influenced" by a true story, and like most movies based on true stories, it has to end with pictures or film of the real people. This time, I actually thought it was charming though. Some of the more far-fetched aspects of this comedy were shown to be not all that far-fetched in that home video footage, and you really see the love these tagging competitors had for each other.

This really is a movie about friendship and the desire to hold on to those special somethings that childhood friends share. For most of the movie, there's one thing that threatens their male bonding and friendship traditions, but at the end, there's a twist that changes all of that. Those last ten minutes or so were completely mishandled although I was actually expecting a twist within a twist that might have made things even worse. This was lacking a feeling of nostalgia that really would have helped its ideas sink in.

The humor is hit and miss. A lot of the slapstick stuff works, maybe even more as action sequences than comedic ones, but the interchanges between the characters weren't as consistent. As these modern comedies typically do, this leans on ribald humor a little too often, likely because mentioning genitalia is always bound to get a laugh out of people. There's nothing particularly creative about any of it, but it's completely harmless.

I think I enjoyed every single performer in this thing, and that includes Jeremy Renner who I don't usually like. Here, I thought he was really funny. Ed Helms and Jake Johnson don't do anything you wouldn't expect them to, and Hannibal Buress, who is on one of my favorite television shows, gets a lot of funny lines. Jon Hamm and the ladies, with the exception of an intense Isla Fisher, don't get as many opportunities to be funny. There's probably too much going on for any real rapport to build up with these guys and there's no character development at all, but there also wasn't really a second in this that I didn't believe they were friends who have been playing the same game of tag for twenty-five years or whatever. And that's probably what matters more.

This was almost exactly as good as I expected it to be, and your enjoyment of it will probably also be exactly what you expect. Unless you're sitting next to me in the theater. Then, you might be too distracted by my odor to relax and enjoy the movie.