Tag

The most interesting thing about Tag is that it was inspired by a true story. Director Jeff Tomsic and his team seem to understand this, as both the marketing and the movie regularly remind you of its real-life origins. A group of grown men have been playing the same game of tag for the last three decades, spending one month each year doing everything they can to avoid one another, while also doing everything they can to secretly find and touch one another. It is kind of incredible. I couldn't help but spend much of the movie wondering about the actual mechanics of how such a game would work in real life?

Is that a problem? Yes and no. Glossy studio comedies tend to have fairly low suspension-of-disbelief settings. The laughs come reliably, but I often found myself wishing I were watching a documentary about the actual guys instead. Still, the film gets a lot of mileage from bouncing its otherwise disparate characters off one another. There's Bob Callahan (Jon Hamm), CEO of an insurance company, able to turn on the chummy charm whenever he wants to; he's being stalked by intensely nebbishy Hogan Malloy (Ed Helms), a veterinarian willing to get a job as a janitor just so he can nail Bob in the middle of a Wall Street Journal interview.

No one has successfully tagged Jerry (Jeremy Renner) in all the years they've been playing the game, and it's easy to see why. Whenever he shows up, the film launches into slo-mo Guy Ritchiesque action set pieces in which Jerry, dexterously and with superheroic ferocity, gives his pals the slip.