Looking for great comedy? 'Tag' isn't it

Grown men playing tag? They chase one another but have trouble catching laughs.

In 2013, The Wall Street Journal ran a diverting little article about a group of men from Spokane, Wash., who managed to stay in touch over decades by playing an annual, month-long game of tag.

Tag, a game that requires no equipment and which relies on speed and elusiveness, isn’t usually thought of as a competitive sport. But this group of long-time pals turned it into one — at least for four weeks a year. They drew up a contract specifying the rules of a game they played with stealth, subterfuge, cunning and an abiding commitment not to be the last man tagged, a status with which one of them had to live for an entire year before the game resumed.

Enter Hollywood and the idea that this amusing piffle of a story would make a good movie.

And it might have had director Jeff Tomsic displayed more interest in exploring the absurd side of male competitive drive, had he and his cohorts done a better job of getting the cast on the same page and had they not turned Tag into a movie that feels like a lukewarm bit of filler sandwiched between summer blockbusters.

The filmmakers seem to have made self-conscious attempts to alter the movie’s gender muscle flexing by having the wife (Isla Fisher) of one of the players (Ed Helms) accompany her husband as the game he plays the game. Moreover, the movie's Wall Street Journal reporter serves little purpose other than to make room for Annabelle Wallis, the actress who plays her.

Not that any of the male characters are particularly well-developed, either.

Helms portrays Hoagie, a man who suggests to another player -- a successful insurance company executive played by Jon Hamm -- that they team up to take down the reigning champion (Jeremy Renner). During the course of several decades, Renner's Jerry never has been tagged. As portrayed here, Jerry has ninja-like skills that are heightened by some quick editing, the sudden insertion of slo-mo trickery and an inexplicable ability to disappear.

Other players include a Denver-based stoner (Jake Johnson), a character who's introduced with a bong joke that would have seemed dated -- even had it turned up 50 years ago. Hannibal Buress signs on as a slightly nerdy gameplayer.

To keep the movie focused, the filmmakers assemble the players in Spokane, where Jerry is about to be married. Jerry hasn’t invited his buddies to the wedding because he knows they’ll show up anyway, using the nuptials as a long-awaited opportunity to bring down the champion.

Setting most of the movie in the players' hometown also gives the filmmakers an opportunity to throw in a bit of competition for an old high-school flame (Rashida Jones), a woman who attracts attention from both Hamm and Johnson’s characters.

All of this generates minimal chemistry. Granted the men are locked in fierce competition, but they seldom seem comfortable with one another, and Hamm, in particular, looks like a misfit addition to a misbegotten group that produces no stand-outs, except possibly for Fisher, who can be more underhanded than any of the male players. By rule, women are excluded from the game.

Renner does a convincing job as Jerry, but his intensely focused performance seems to belong in another movie.

Because the men are not playing in the confined space of a schoolyard but in the real world, they're forced to don lame disguises to sneak up one another or to engage in trickery, bribery and other forms of deceit that will allow them to approach their prey.

I went back and read the original Wall Street Journal article and a couple of follow-ups, all of which were more interesting than the resultant movie which can’t find its rhythm as a robust comedy with outlandish flourishes, including a far-fetched (and not especially funny) bit of action set in a wooded area.

The tag catchphrase — “you’re it" — might have given the movie stinging sharpness, but after laying out its premise, this over-amped effort does little to catch us unaware — and that includes a last-minute revelation that may have been added to create a bit of emotion without having done anything to earn it.

Too much plot mars the magic

Laden with characters and plot, Now You See Me -- a caper movie involving four magicians -- is more juggling act than magic show.

At one point during Now You See Me -- a caper movie about four larcenous magicians -- Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine are featured in a happily confrontational scene. Caine, as an arrogant tycoon used to getting his way, and Freeman, as a former magician who has built a TV career by exposing other people's tricks, are locked in a toe-to-toe, eyeball-to-eyeball exchange that's fun to watch.

My reperotire of tricks doesn't include mind reading, but I'd like to believe that both Caine and Freeman were thinking, "Take your best shot because no matter how good it is, I'll match it."

I'm not saying that this scene should be added to anyone's list of great movie moments or that it's in a particularly good movie, but it hints at what might have happened had director Louis Leterrier (Clash of the Titans, The Incredible Hulk and Transporter 2) been able to get beyond slick surfaces, brisk pacing and flashy camera work. Now You See Me suggests an anatomical impossibility: It's all pulse and no heart.

The movie begins in promising enough fashion, introducing us to four magicians, each with a distinct skill. Jesse Eisenberg plays Daniel Atlas, a whip-smart master of card tricks. Woody Harrelson portrays Merritt McKinney, a cynical mentalist. Dave Franco is Jack Wilder, a young man who claims to have paranormal mind powers but actually specializes in picking pockets, and Isla Fisher appears as Henley Reeves. Her act consists of trying to unshackle herself in a water tank that's about to be invaded by flesh eating piranhas.

The four magicians are summoned to New York City, where a mysterious and unseen figure involves them in a scheme to use complicated illusions to mask a series of heists -- and to provide the movie with a core of mystery: Just who's pulling the strings here?

This, of course, introduces the opportunity for Leterrier to toss around a variety of red herrings and to stage some glossy show-business spectacles: We see the magicians -- who form a group known as The Four Horsemen -- creating their illusions, most of which eventually are explained.

So long as the movie stays close to the four magicians, it's easy to remain involved, especially if you don't think too much about whether you're watching genuine sleight-of-hand or CGI-assisted magic. But Now You See Me eventually shifts its focus, concentrating on the FBI agent (Mark Ruffalo) who's trying to catch the magicians with help from an Interpol detective played by French actress Melanie Laurent.

Leterrier has been given lots of heavy acting artillery, and any one of the movie's large cast could have provided a compelling center. But instead of conjuring up wily character magic, Leterrier seems more like a juggler who's frantically trying to keep the movie's many plot points aloft.

If you bother to play Now You See Me back in your mind (and there's no compelling reason you should), you'll be hard-pressed to believe that the intricacies of its plot were remotely possible anywhere but in a screenwriter's imagination: Three writers were involved in creating the screenplay and story. They find entertaining moments in what othewise amounts to a self-defeating hodge podge of conceits, ploys and attempted fake-outs.

Leapin' lizards! Rango is one wild ride

Rango has some rough spots, but it's clever and creative -- and maybe not for kids.

Rango, an animated western, is too enjoyably weird to ignore - even if it's not entirely clear exactly who the movie is for. Film buffs? Maybe. Fans of clever invention? Sure. Kids? I'm not certain.

Think Sergio Leone meets Chuck Jones with traces of Chinatown thrown in, and you'll begin to understand what director Gore Verbinski has wrought, an animated western that plays with genre clichés and assembles some of the year's most vivid imagery.

Rango, from another script that feels as if it has been composed by tossing ingredients into a Cuisinart, is made tolerable by its blend of silly humor, arch wit, savvy movie references and a few major surprises. The movie can be fun, but it's difficult to imagine that the littlest kids will get much beyond the cartoon antics supplied by Verbinski, who proved himself a master of visual comedy in a couple of Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

Did I mention that Rango's hero is a lizard voiced by Johnny Depp, an actor who's no stranger to nutty proceedings? Well, that's what Verbinski gives us, a bug-eyed wannabe gunslinger who - I'm giving away nothing here - ultimately saves the day.

Expelled from his terrarium early in the movie, the lizard - apparently a pet chameleon - wanders into the desert where he winds up in the aptly named town of Dirt, a dusty outpost that's on the verge of running out of water.

Our lizard hero tells a tall tale, defends the town from a ravenous hawk (sort of), winds up as sheriff and begins fulfilling his destiny, something he's been encouraged to do by a sagacious armadillo called Roadkill (Alfred Molina).

Verbinski doesn't skimp on characters. In fact, he overloads the screen with everything from rats to bats. There's Beans (Isla Fisher), a spunky lizard gal who's trying to save her daddy's ranch. Ned Beatty gives voice to the town's mayor, a turtle with a big hat and an ego to match, and Bill Nighy gives sinister life to the hired gun in the piece, the frightening Rattlesnake Jake.

This highlight reel only skims the surface of a big-time voice cast that also includes Abigail Preslin, Ray Winstone, Harry Dean Stanton and Timothy Olyphant - not to mention a mariachi band composed of four owls.

Visually striking, Rango eventually floods the screen with action that includes a heavy barrage of gun fire that's appropriate to a genre spoof, but a bit much for little kids. Rattlesnake Jake gave me the willies, so I'm assuming that younger kids may find him scary, as well. And some of the language is ... well ... indelicate.

Somewhere around the three-quarter mark my enjoyment flagged, maybe because the story suffers from literary indigestion: It's overstuffed.

Still, Verbinski deserves credit for turning Rango into an impressively creative entertainment whose excesses are redeemed by the twang of its best dialog and the sheer wildness of its heart.