Jonah Naplan   February 5, 2023

I didn’t like “80 for Brady,” but in all fairness this movie wasn’t made for me. This film was intended for the older people who attended my screening, who frequently laughed nonstop at these female icons doing what they’ve been doing best for several decades.

“80 for Brady” comes to us just after Tom Brady’s announcement of unretirement and then retirement again, and just a weekend before Super Bowl LVII. It tells the true story of four passionate Tom Brady fans, who embark on a cross country journey to Houston, Texas to see their hero play in the 2017 Super Bowl. But ironically, these enthusiasts are actually four women in their mid-seventies—Trish, Lou, Betty, and Maura—here played by the icons, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Sally Field, and Rita Moreno. 

Trish writes erotic fan fiction about Brady’s teammate, Rob Gronkowski, but falls in love too easily and is cautious about getting her heart broken again. Lou is refusing to open a letter from the hospital disclosing information about whether her cancer has returned. Betty is a retired MIT mathematics professor, and she loves her husband (Bob Balaban), but his neediness has made her feel effaced. And Maura is mourning the loss of her late husband who died pretty recently, although she claims becoming a widow is the same thing as divorce.

I didn’t find “80 for Brady” to be much interesting, although the chemistry between these four women, was, if anything, probably the best part. No one’s bad in the film, but the talent in front of the camera can only sometimes hold up against a story that only categorizes these characters into basic, one-note personalities that follows all of the tropes we’ve come to expect from movies like this. And the biggest trait that all of these characters express far more often than necessary, is the fact that all four of them are over the moon about big, muscular men, a trait that does nothing to empower these characters and is so often overused during the movie that it made me uncomfortable. Rita Moreno is a legendary EGOT, and now she’s being subjugated to this? The biggest reason why I rarely found “80 for Brady” to be funny is because there’s really only so much you can do with the same repeated joke of “Haha this old lady likes sex,” played over and over and over again.

“80 for Brady” does not show these women as heroes. And in the movie, they’re merely portrayed as the brunt of every joke. It may be mildly amusing the first two or three times, and yes, I did smile a few sparse occasions, and chuckled once. But stretching an already accentuated joke into an entire movie just comes off as mean spirited and sometimes tedious. These icons try their absolute best to hoist director Kyle Marvin’s movie onto their experienced shoulders, but even they fail to upkeep the sturdiness a film plot needs. And the movie is much more interested in fantasizing the tall, masculine football players than it is in giving depth to our leading women.

The film is essentially one cockamamie scheme after the next as our protagonists realize that attending the biggest sporting event in America is not nearly as easy as it may seem. In the opening of the film, they receive a chance to win tickets to the Super Bowl through a radio station, and after winning, they fly to Houston, a journey that is definitely not without its inconveniences. Some are more amusing than others, all feel redundant and superfluous.

The highlights of the marketing for “80 for Brady” show clips from the NFL experience that the ladies attend, a fancy party, and a dance number that Gugu (Billy Porter) takes the lead in, in order to somehow persuade a security guard that our heroines are part of the Super Bowl Half-Time Show dance crew. And yet somehow the trailer makes all of these scenes seem flashier than they actually are. Misleading marketing is another topic for another time, but “80 for Brady” certainly had much of it. All of these aforementioned sequences eventually come out as dull and lifeless, not even able to be upholstered by guest appearances from Guy Fieri and Patton Oswalt. Harry Hamlin and Glynn Turman are in the movie too, but they leave an even smaller lasting impression than a singular blade of grass in a football field.

The movie ultimately ends with the Super Bowl itself. There’s a strangely played encounter with Tom Brady and Lou before an official one after the game, clips of the football game’s highlights are interspersed between reaction shots of excited fans in the crowd and our four women, and, as it seems, everything we had ever hoped for comes true. (It doesn’t).

But reader, I must once again make it very clear that “80 for Brady” was not in any way intended for me. This film exists for people older than myself, and speaking of which, I was the youngest in my theater. What I may see as a mediocre, senior citizen-directed schlock fest, you might find to be the next “Citizen Kane.” And that’s okay. Much like the football player in which this film centers on, you either love it or you don’t.

Now playing in theaters.