This is kind of odd, that the screenwriters should introduce a relatively serious topic here and then have all three characters just shuffle it aside because it’s the month of May, when this group’s game is traditionally played, and Hoagie has a plan to trap Jerry, the only member of the playing fivesome who’s never been tagged. The subject is diabetes, and the company’s supposedly shady business tactics relative to that disease. In disguise, Hoagie infiltrates a conference room where Bob is being interviewed by Rebecca, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal ( Annabelle Wallis). Damn, these guys take this game seriously. Yes, moviegoers, the con is on as we glom onto Hoagie’s real intentions: to infiltrate the office of a big insurance company so that Hoagie can tag its new CEO, Bob Callahan (Hamm). This despite, as his interviewer notes, the fact that he is already a successful veterinarian. The movie begins with Ed Helms’ character, Hoagie, applying for a janitorial job. It’s more that, well, try to imagine a group of African American men feeling safe enough to play "adult" tag at their places of work or various other public spaces. It’s not so much that I’m under the impression that tag is a game most sensible persons of color might consider corny. No one should be surprised, I think, to learn that the actual group of men on which this movie is based are in fact all white. It’s a lazy, vulgar celebration of White Male American Dumbness-one that only put an African American in the cast to camouflage just how much of a celebration of White Male American Dumbness it is. “Tag,” directed by Jeff Tomsic from a script that Rob McKittrick and Mark Steilen very loosely adapted from a feature story in the Wall Street Journal, and starring Ed Helms, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Jake Johnson, Hannibal Buress, and Isla Fisher, is not just asinine but out and out grotesque. As it happens, that’s the only thing I got right. And I thought, “that’s one of the most asinine things I’ve ever heard.”Īnd even then I could envision the sentimentality that would be brought to this enterprise. It was some time ago that I first read that Warner Brothers and New Line had made a motion picture based on the exploits of a group of friends who had been keeping up a game of tag across multiple decades, stemming from childhood to adulthood. It occurs to me, as I sit down to write this review, that perhaps I was the wrong person to be assigned this movie.
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