Tag (2018, Jeremy Renner, Ed Helms, Jake Johnson, Hannibal Buress, Jon Hamm, Isla Fisher, Nora Dunn, Leslie Bibb) – Movie Review

Jeremy Renner, Ed Helms, Jake Johnson, Hannibal Buress and Jon Hamm play childhood friends who have been playing the same game of tag for over 35 years in director Jeff Tomsic’s pathetic comedy Tag.

Each May the game resumes for a month and the middle-aged idiot taggers take absurd lengths to make someone else ‘it’ or avoid being ‘it’, especially Renner’s super-competitive Jerry Pierce, who has a 100 per cent record of never being tagged. This year, the others, of course, are on his case.

The reason for all this is that the guys just want to keep in touch and stay in each others’ lives. It’s not about tag. It’s about male bonding. No, it is about tag. The guys are all super-competitive. No, it’s about both. No, who cares?

Director Jeff Tomsic’s hard-to-sit-through comedy is witless, charmless and unfunny, with no redeeming features. Rob McKittrick and Mark Steilen’s sub-The Hangover screenplay, a lazy mix of smutty and slapstick, is dire and desperate. Though based on the Wall Street Journal article entitled It Takes Planning, Caution to Avoid Being It by Russell Adams, telling a true story about a bunch of middle-aged idiots still playing tag, it has no relation to real life or real laughs.

All five main actors can’t raise a smile between them, and the support performances are dismal. Tag is a laugh-free zone. The female roles are terrible, defying the actresses – Annabelle Wallis, Isla Fisher, Nora Dunn, Leslie Bibb and Rashida Jones.

The solution would be to hire five new stars who can actually play this kind of farcical comedy, an entire new cast of amusing supporting players, and two new writers who can come up with a really funny screenplay. But then you still wouldn’t have a good movie because the basic idea behind Tag won’t fly.

Tag is the turkey of the year.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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