Tag (Jeff Tomsic)

[Henry Gale]

IMDb (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2854926/) / Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(2018_film))

https://i2.wp.com/teaser-trailer.com/wp-content/uploads/Tag-New-Banner-Poster.jpg?ssl=1

[Mal]

The actual Tag story was profiled on CBS Sunday Morning. I give it a B.

[Henry Gale]

I would similarly give this a solid B!

It's definitely a hodgepodge of different things, from its "Based on a true story" framing, to what a standard studio comedy should feel like in structure and form all versus the type content of what the performances and jokes delivered within it bring to the table, but it ends up working for a significant percentage of its runtime.

The sentimentality and darker comic threads are the things I actually thought worked the most, despite maybe being the furthest away from each other on the hypothetical compatibility scale. It's just often those safer edges of it as a studio product that seem to keep it from feeling too adventurous or properly wild. And then many of the action elements in the big sequences of its titular game -- sometimes cleverly done with inner monologues and clinical slow-motion, sometimes in the perfunctory default of comedies for the past few decades now of people being chased/chasing others, yelling, breaking through things, while a popular song or generic rock score plays non-diegetically -- that don't always feel especially inventive or worthwhile.

There's also the question of what the movie was thinking in including these its female characters at all, since it makes little effort to give them anything to do. The core five guys in the cast rightfully command their screentime, as it's okay for this to be entirely a movie about the 30+ year friendship of male friendship through this lens of this crazy tradition they have. But the characters played by Isla Fisher, Rashida Jones, and especially Annabelle Wallis' report all feel varying degrees of tacked-on and unnecessary, not there to do much but provide vocal explanations for the core group's history (Wallis), add conflict via a romantic subplot (Jones), or be the main character's wife and amplify the energy of every big setpiece (Fisher). They're all way too underwritten and never integrated into the story essentially enough to feel like the movie is doing anything with them for them but wasting the actresses' time. Leslie Bibb as Renner's soon-to-be wife comes out of it best, maybe because, not coincidentally, she's actually there to be important to the plot, and the efforts of her nuanced performance add to the momentum and energy of the key conflict of the story, and isn't in it when she doesn't need to be, instead of simply making time for another female character it's not truly interested in.

I would say this year's Game Night is the better version of this type of studio comedy in terms of actually being very thoroughly visually dynamic and also really engaging from exciting plot and genre-blending stylistic perspectives, even if its actual comedy isn't quite as funny as Tag's. Here, I think the jokes are are faster and more effortlessly delivered, even if there aren't as many scenes that manage to feel effectively cinematic. Tomsic directed the Coat Check and FOMO episode of Broad City, as well as every episode of Idiotsitter, and that should give you a sense of him going into something like this, but then there's also every comedy that Warner Bros. and New Line have produced over the last decade+ from the Harold & Kumar movies to Wedding Crashers to Horrible Bosses to Central Intelligence to Fist Fight that can give you a sense of the boundaries they tend to set for where these types of comedies are allowed to live in creatively.

But still, even without too much ambition on its mind: For its cast (especially Hamm, Buress and Renner in top form), its quick and zippy hilarity, and its surprisingly effective heartfelt undercurrent that quietly builds through it and then peaks right at the end, it's a very nice summertime comedy.

[TGM]

This was fucking great!! I was grinning like an idiot throughout the entire thing. X)

[Mal]

Studio comedy with no story where everyone plays a version of themselves. I disliked this movie because it never made me laugh. I did like Isla Fisher, but she's playing a version of the same character she was in Wedding Crashers. ugh. I'm just thankful they didn't needlessly drag this out to two hours.