Tag

This is a reasonably silly comedy about 40-something men indulging in extended childhood as an ongoing game of tag ends up lasting multiple decades. The simple setup gets complicated by four of the friends gathering at the wedding of a fifth, the one-who-has-never-been tagged, determined to catch him this time. So basically it's a live-action road-runner cartoon, with Jeremy Renner as the ubersmug road-runner and the rest being increasingly desperate coyotes.

And when the film keeps this in mind and keeps things cartoony, light and physical, this works really well. Unfortunately there are two cases in the last third where there's an attempt to darken the material for deeper significance and the attempts at depth really don't work - these characters are in no way built to carry this level of significance. This is loosely based on a true story (though the original story involves ten men, not five) and the closing credits has footage of the original guys, but it's not really a very significant story. Isla Fisher as the way-too-into-it wife of one of the taggers takes honours as funniest, with Renner's smirking target quite deliciously hateable and Hannibal Burress throwing out some hilarious non-sequiturs. So this mostly goes down pretty easy, with a couple of choke-points near the end.