SHORT TAKE

TAG directed by Jeff Tomsic

At age nine, a bunch of kids from Spokane, Washington, began playing a game of tag. Nearly 30 years later, they’re grown men with responsible careers and families, and are still playing that game, the month of May set aside for a retreat into the carefree frivolities of youth.

Their story made for a semi-charming Wall Street Journal profile, but none of that charm made it into Tag, an Olympically unfunny dirge utterly lacking the idiosyncrasies of Game Night, another recent film about ludic traditions.

The gang has been reduced from 10 to five, played by Ed Helms, Jon Hamm, Jake Johnson, Hannibal Buress (a stand-up comedian whose dry delivery provides relief from the pall of humourlessness) and Jeremy Renner as the one guy who’s never been “it”.

Together they unleash a barrage of dick jokes, dope gags and that peculiar speciality of Hollywood comedies: extreme violence. Hamm chucks an office chair at a window in a bid to escape being tagged, it bounces back, sends him sprawling, and he rises again without even a bloody nose. Action has no consequence, in other words, a contrast to so many silent-era comedians who could stretch the threat of peril into an entire sketch.

You yearn for that kind of bygone wit, and for the men to heed the advice of Rashida Jones, who shows up as an insultingly fleeting love interest: “Stop it! You’re acting like a bunch of children!”

IN CINEMAS NOW James Robins