Tag 2018 movie12/25/2023 Instead, a detour through an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting flounders while attempting to add unnecessary texture. This should’ve been a lean humor machine with no fat to trim. In Tag, there are patches of narrative that bog down the action. Some jokes work, others don’t but, with such brisk pacing, there’s no opportunity to hear the “thud” of the duds. Game Night offers a rapid-fire assault of humor, some low-brow, some high. The similarities in terms of audience and comic aspirations are numerous, but the key difference is in the execution. Tag pales in comparison to another comedy winner, the recently-released Game Night. Speaking of flat, what’s up with Hannibal Buress’ character, Sable? He is so detached from his supposedly best friends his quirky comments are so out of place and random. That failure in attribution is itself turned into a joke, but it’s one of many that fall flat. With that mission in mind, the boys are buoyed by a solid mantra, “We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.” For decades, these geniuses attributed that quote to Ben Franklin, granting it a gravitas that actually needs to be credited to George Bernard Shaw. Hoagie (Ed Helms, the Hangover trilogy) wants to bring that streak to an end. Jerry (Jeremy Renner, The Avengers) is a tag ninja with some mad, mad skills and he has never been tagged. Season after season, one player winds up staring down the next 11 months wearing the undesirable moniker of “It.” All have held the title. And, of course, Denver’s pot laws are exploited for cheap laughs. Year after year, as the month of May rolls around, a new season of tag is played, even as the players move to diverse locations like Denver, Portland and Spokane. Through the decades, those rules have held true. And the game is afoot during the month of May. It’s fine to punch a fellow player in the butt cheeks. There are also important boundaries to identify. The rules were crafted by five 9-year-old boys. This epic game of tag - as played out in the movie - dates back to 1983 and involves five best friends (in reality, there are 10, but no doubt that’s too narratively daunting when Tag struggles to create five unique characters, each laden with stereotypical emotions and reactions). Tag should’ve gone for the jugular and taken the climax in a totally different, totally liberating direction - one much more in keeping with the movie’s “keep playing or grow old” theme. It is a great idea for a stupid movie, but the story falls for predictable Hollywood traps, including a feeble attempt at heart tugging that doesn’t really fit. It took a lot of smarts to make those movies work so well. And their stupidity is actually superficial. They gleefully brandish their preposterousness. Think about really stupid - and yet truly great - movies like Dodgeball, Zoolander (and Zoolander 2) and Nacho Libre. This could’ve - should’ve - been a stupid masterpiece, something that takes a goofy premise and turns it into a movie gem worth watching over and over, even if only as background noise late at night on streaming video. And that includes changing the journalist from Russell to Rebecca (Annabelle Wallis, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword). But plenty of liberties were taken while stretching out the newspaper story to fill 100 minutes of screen time. Tag is “inspired” by a true story, with its source material pulled from a 2013 Wall Street Journal article by Russell Adams ( It Takes Planning, Caution to Avoid Being It, still available online behind a WSJ subscriber paywall).
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