Directed by: Kyle Marvin
Starring: Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Sally Field, Rita Moreno, Tom Brady
Rated PG-13, 98 minutes
Like many New England Patriots fans, I remember where I was when they played the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI. I was at a bar on Blake Street in Denver, watching in misery as the Pats fell to a 28-3 deficit, victory seemingly out of reach. Earlier in the evening I had been making conversation with two Falcons fans nearby, who grew louder and cockier as the Patriots fell behind. But then Tom Brady, as he had done so many times before, came alive and turned the game around. With under a minute left, the Patriots tied it. In overtime—still the only overtime in Super Bowl history—they won. Brady got his fifth ring; the Falcons fans left the bar in a hurry.
“80 for Brady,” a buddy comedy about four octogenarians traveling to Houston to witness this infamous game, tries and fails to recreate the excitement that Pats fans felt at the time. It’s not just a vanity project courtesy of the now Tampa-based Brady, who co-produced this film and plays himself. It’s also a poorly written, unevenly acted, inconsequential comedy with all the depth of a cardboard cutout of your favorite player. If you cherish your memories of Tom Brady the Patriot, do yourself a favor and see something else.
You could be forgiven for expecting better. Look no further than the cast list, whose breadth and depth boggles the mind. In the leads are four actresses who collectively have won five Oscars, three Tonys, and more than a dozen Emmys, to say nothing of Golden Globes and SAG awards and honorary prizes and lifetime achievement recognitions. What in the world are they doing here? It’s a good thing they showed up, anyway; their collective screen presence makes this film more tolerable than it has any right to be. Sally Field (“Lincoln”), as the mathematically-minded Betty, gives the best performance of the group, balancing the zany anything-goes spirit of their impromptu vacation with the more sensible reality within which Betty chooses to operate. Few jokes in the movie land, but the ones that do are mostly hers.
The movie is saddled with constant and embarrassing missteps, the result of uninspired editing and writing. Many of the film’s jokes are unimaginative to begin with, but Kyle Marvin, making his directorial debut, sandbags them with needless reaction shots and staged laughter. A string of high-profile cameos, from Patton Oswalt to Billy Porter to Food Network star Guy Fieri, only makes the whole project feel desperate, as if Marvin and company are determined to buy their way into our good graces.
More perplexing and disappointing still is Brady himself. Even if you think his singular success in football has earned him the right to this kind of unabashed ego-fluffing, there is no getting around his emptiness as an actor. There’s a recurring joke involving Brady speaking to Lily Tomlin’s (“Grace and Frankie”) Lou through the television, and if Brady possessed any sense of comedic delivery, it might have landed. Seven Super Bowl rings do not a movie star make.
All misbegotten comedy and unbridled vanity aside, “80 for Brady” suffers fundamentally from an unwillingness to take itself seriously. We learn, gradually, that Lou is facing a cancer scare, which lends some urgency to her desire to see Tom Brady play in person. There’s a poignant parallel here with Brady’s real life; his mother, a cancer survivor, was undergoing chemotherapy the same year that the Patriots met the Falcons in the Super Bowl. “80 for Brady” even splices in a clip of Brady embracing his mother in the victory celebration after the game. So when Lou finally meets him face-to-face, the monologue he delivers to her can be viewed essentially as a monologue directed to his mother. Why, then, is the sentiment so hollow, the delivery so flat? Why is this moment, the heart of the story, so stupefyingly insincere?
Maybe that’s just the curse of Tom Brady’s stature as the most successful quarterback in NFL history. He’s become so famous that he’s a non-entity, a vacant room, an unnecessary feature in the film he produced and which bears his name in the title. What begins as a harmless, if mediocre, comedy about aging gal pals going on some light adventures is brought to an agonizing nadir in his presence. As the old advice goes, never meet your heroes.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 2/10/23.