Mark Reviews Movies: 80 FOR BRADY

80 for Brady, Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 2, 2023

It's tough to dislike 80 for Brady, because its cast is so charming, the jokes are in good humor, and there is a sincere heart beating beneath the endeavor. The unfortunate fact is that it's more difficult to actually like this movie. It relies too much on the actors to carry the material. The gags become overly predictable, familiar, and repetitive, and that sincerity is buried beneath just enough cynicism and laziness for it to really register.

Again, one can't argue with the casting choices here. The central premise revolves around a group of four friends, all of them—save for one who has to repeat she hasn't hit that milestone yet—are in their 80s. They have become big fans of the Boston area's professional football team and, in particular, its star quarterback Tom Brady.

The story, obviously, is set in 2017, before Brady's move to one of Florida's multiple pro football clubs and the current uncertainty about his future career. It's strange to be discussing such matters within this context, but since the quarterback also serves as a producer, one wonders how much of the apparent hesitation about Brady's next steps—as of this writing—is calculated for the marketing of this movie. Surely, there are some out there who will want to see it, as Brady does appear as himself beyond archival footage of him playing, just to get some evidence or look for some clues about what his plans might be.

Making Brady such a key figure here is probably a mistake, if only because—let's face it—he's not much of an actor, who's ultimately called upon to help sell some of the story's more heartfelt moments (A trio of his former teammates are more amusing and believable in a series of one-liner jokes). As an idea, the football player works as a symbol, but as soon as he comes into the mix of this story, Brady is nothing more than a distraction. As for whether he says he will or won't retire in this movie, Brady certainly makes a point of teasing that he might be considering either option at the moment his last scene was filmed.

That's more than enough about Brady, because now he's injected himself into this review for no real reason except that he's unfortunately unavoidable in talking about the movie. The four aforementioned friends are played by Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, and Sally Field. It's the sort of casting coup that still feels impressive, even if it comes after Hollywood has, as it so often does, shifted their careers into a gimmicky, mostly disposable comedy such as this.

Tomlin's Lou is the de facto head of the group, leading weekly watch-parties of games featuring Brady's team during football season. It all started by chance, when Lou, recovering from a final round of chemotherapy, happened upon Brady's first game. Since then, she, Fonda's Trish, Moreno's Maura, and Field's Betty haven't missed a game on TV. After Lou receives but doesn't read the results of a recent medical test, she arranges, without her friends' knowledge, for tickets for the Super Bowl, where Lou's hero Brady is playing for his fifth championship.

The actual story here (To call it a plot would be pushing the term) involves the four friends' misadventures on the way to the big game. There's not much to the characters, of course, since most of the gags are about the situations into which they get themselves, but with these actors, that barely matters. It's nice to see Tomlin clearly enjoying herself. It's amusing enough to watch Fonda play a flirtatious, always-falling-in-love woman who writes romance fiction about Rob Gronkowski. Moreno is sweetly subdued as a recent widow, and Field is effortlessly delightful as a long-time wife to a helpless husband (played by Bob Balaban) who just wants to have some fun for once in her life.

Up to a certain point, it almost feels as if the screenwriters, Sarah Haskins and Emily Halpern, and director Kyle Marvin actually care more about how these friends interact, how these characters actually want to gain some exciting experience, and the depth of these bonds than some broad gags. Sure, Maura accidentally takes a sleeping pill just heading to the airport, leading to an unnecessarily elaborate scheme to "break her out" of a retirement home, and yes, Betty ends up in a spicy chicken wing contest (hosted by Guy Fieri, one of the multiple cameos beyond football players) that goes nowhere. It's all so good-natured and relatively restrained, though, that the movie's eventual turn toward generic, worn-out jokes (The ladies unwittingly get high and have to dance to get out of a tough spot, for example) is even more disappointing.

Then, there's the unfortunate climax of 80 for Brady, which has some potential as women scheme to crash, rise through the seating ranks of, and eventually interact with the big game. The idea is sound, but the momentum of the characters' adventure is undone by the game and the insistence that Brady be a bigger part of this movie than he has any need to be.

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