80 For Brady

80 For Brady,A group of octogenarian pals set their sights on attending the 2017 Superbowl in Kyle Marvin's charming but unambitious comedy.

While he’s a household name in the USA, quarterback Tom Brady hasn’t quite announced himself on the global stage, which is probably a lot to do with the fact that American football itself doesn’t have quite the same international draw as, say, ‘soccer’ or tennis. For the unaware, Brady is to American football what Pelé is to actual football – a player so preternaturally talented, he’s become all but synonymous with the sport. Since he was drafted to the NFL in 2002, Brady has gone on to break almost every major record, including winning seven Superbowls across his 21-year career, making him the most-awarded player of all time. He retired again in February, and will start his new job as lead commentator on Fox next year – but first, he’s got some spritely pensioners to delight in Kyle Marvin’s feel-good comedy (based on a true story!).

Best friends Lou (Lily Tomlin) Trish (Jane Fonda) Maura (Rita Moreno) and Betty (Sally Field) are die-hard New England Patriots fans, having developed a love of football while nursing Lou through her cancer treatment some years previous. In 2017, as “the Pats” make it to the Super Bowl LI final in Houston, the gang lament that they won’t see their beloved team face off against the Atlanta Falcons in the flesh. But Lou isn’t so easily defeated, and a conveniently-timed television phone-in competition soon sees the fab four jet to Texas with the hottest ticket in town.

From there the gals get into various sticky situations and hijinks on their way to the big game: Trish runs into ex-NFL player Dan O’Callahan, where a mutual attraction develops; Maura accidentally gets involved in a high-stakes poker game; Betty meets Guy Fieri and enters a hot wing eating competition, and Lou fields contact from her concerned daughter, who wants her to call her oncologist back. Screenwriters Emily Haskins and Sarah Halpern (co-writer of Booksmart) build in some decent backstory, including Betty’s strained relationship with her dithering husband Mark (Bob Balaban) and Maura’s lingering grief following the death of her husband, though it all feels cloyingly familiar, and a little underwhelming considering the star power signed on here.

Brady – who also served as producer – has a small role, playing himself, and he performs exactly as well as he has to. It’s probably not the start of a dazzling on-cinematic career for him, but in the grand canon of sports stars on screen, he’s vaguely charismatic at least. Naturally he doesn’t hold a candle to Fonda, Field, Moreno and Tomlin, with five Academy Awards and a combined 259 years of experience between them. They deliver the flimsy material admirably, gamely indulging the cheesier lines of dialogue, but one can’t help but feel that they are underserved by this frothy, formulaic outing. It’s well-known that decent roles for women over 50 in Hollywood are few and far between – come back, Nancy Meyers, we need you desperately – so it’s refreshing to see a film that centres not one but four older female characters (particularly in a genre usually dominated by men), and these icons are clearly having a blast bouncing off each other, but the conception and execution leave much to be desired.

Perhaps diehard football fans will have a little more fun with the premise, but the stars have to do some heavy lifting, and as charming as they are together, one can’t help but wonder if this is the best we can do for actresses of their calibre. Surely the industry has more to offer for actors and audiences of a certain age than tired jokes about edibles, and an erotic fiction subplot which feels like a clumsy throwback to the heyday of Fifty Shades of Gray?

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Published 24 Mar 2023