I was about to compare 80 for Brady to a not-particularly-inspired extended episode of The Golden Girls until it dawned on me that a.) many other critics would probably say the same thing and b.) it struck me as being both a bit of a cheap shot and somewhat inaccurate to boot since that show backed up the undeniable chemistry between its four leads with zippy writing and convincingly-drawn characters. No, it would be far more apt to compare it to The Golden Palace, the short-lived and largely forgotten spin-off that tried to get away with taking the three remaining characters (Bea Arthur having spit the bit regarding a return), sticking them in a highly contrived situation and hoping that lingering fondness for their past escapades would bring audiences in. To be fair, based on the surprising amount of people at the public showing I attended—which consisted entirely of women evidently over the age of 70 with the exception of myself and one old man who felt the need to grumble to me afterwards about the presence of “Hanoi Jane” (yes, I responded and yes, it got a little weird)—the formula may prove to be a success in this particular case but that says more about the slim pickings out there for a traditionally underserved portion of the moviegoing audience than anything else.
Set in 2017, the film centers on four best friends—Lou (Lily Tomlin), Trish (Jane Fonda), Maura (Rita Moreno) and Betty (Sally Field)—who have been hardcore fans of the New England Patriots and Tom Brady since 2001, when Lou was undergoing a debilitating round of chemotherapy and they just happened to tune in for the fateful game where low draft pick Brady stepped onto the field and changed the history of the sport. Now the Patriots are heading back to the Super Bowl but this time, Lou is determined to do more than just watch it on television. Amazingly, she manages to actually win tickets to the big game and the four head off to Houston, where each gets a chance to squeeze in a personal epiphany before game time—Lou learns to be more spontaneous while finding the courage to face a new potential health setback, the outwardly vampy Trish finds the courage to open her heart up to love following a bad divorce, Betty finds the courage to do things for herself instead of simply being a sounding board for her wishy-washy husband (Bob Balaban) and Maura finds the courage to move on from the recent death of her husband. When the four aren’t coming to terms with things, they get involved in all sorts of wild and totally unexpected hijinks, such as a hot wing-eating contest, accidental dopings via what must be the most powerful gummies ever produced and the disappearance of the tickets, leading to a scene where they find themselves posing as some of the dancers for Lady Gaga’s halftime show in an attempt to sneak in. (Thankfully, Gaga had better things to do than turns up here, though we do get plenty of Guy Fieri instead.)
Look, I adore the film’s four leads as much as anyone and the idea of seeing them together has an undeniable appeal—even with the odious presence of Tom Brady thrown into the mix—but the screenplay by Sarah Haskins and Emily Halpern (supposedly based on a true story whose connection to what is shown on the screen is, I suspect, little more than the fact that four women of a certain age went to the Super Bowl) is pretty embarrassing in the way that it gathers these queens of the cinema and then gives them nothing but sub-sitcom nonsense to work with. Of the quartet, Moreno and Field come off the best—the former because of the still-considerable force of her personality and the latter because the scenes between her and Balaban are the closest that the film comes to something resembling recognizable human behavior. For her part, Fonda is wasted in a part that asks little of her other than to model a series of wigs, make out in a closet with an ex-jock played by Harry Hamlin and lust after Rob Gronkowski to the extent that she has a profitable side gig writing Gronkowski-themed erotica (published in hardback, no less).
And yet, the biggest waste of talent here is Tomlin, who demonstrates none of the keenly observant wit that made her one of the great comedic geniuses of our time. Like most people, I always assumed that her lowest and least convincing point as an actress came during the infamous hot tub seduction sequence between her and John Travolta in the infamous 1978 bomb Moment by Moment and even in that case, the argument could be made (and has by some slightly braver than I) that this particular sequence was meant to be satire. Nevertheless, that scene comes across as both staid and plausible when compared to the jaw-dropping sequence at the end of this film where Lou and Brady actually meet in the locker room following (Spoiler Alert) the Patriots victory and he credits her with helping to inspire him to victory for reasons that I will not be getting into here.
If that sounds like a little bit of pandering, that isn’t the half of it. The entire film is essentially a propaganda piece from an NFL clearly hoping to erase memories of the various scandals and controversies that have plagued the league by giving the characters and the audience a version of Super Bowl weekend so overly sanitized that even the hot wings fail to inspire distress. (There isn’t even a Deflategate joke to be had here and that would seem to be a no-brainer.) Now I am fully aware that the only way that the NFL would allow the use of their important trademarks in this film would be if the screenplay depicted them in a positive light but the lengths that it goes to in order to try to pull this off are increasingly ludicrous. At some points, I half expected a chyron to appear at the bottom of the screen reading “The NFL: We’re Good Now, Right?”
Unless you get some bizarre thrill out of watching a quarter of living legends embarrass themselves with material so far beneath them that shovels must have been needed each day on the set, 80 for Brady is almost completely devoid of any entertainment value. The comedy is limp, the heartfelt material is laughable and the narrative is so thin that as to be practically non-existent. Those curious about whether Brady (who was also one of the film’s producers) has any presence on the big screen will discover that on the grand scale of jocks-turned-actors go, he is no Elroy ‘Crazylegs’ Hirsch. The end result is a film made by people who seem to have nothing on their minds than the paychecks they will be earning for coasting through utter tripe. Hopefully, they all got paid in crypto from FTX for their efforts.