80 for Brady Brings Together Four of Our Greatest Icons for Agreeably Mediocre Foolishness

This movie was silly.

I’ve spent a lot of my life watching movies by myself. I suppose that’s not terribly unusual. Lots of people watch movies on their laptops or at home when they’re alone. That’s true of me but I have also spent a LOT of time in empty theaters watching movies by myself. 

It’s an experience I am extremely familiar with but there’s something lonely and sad and surreal about it all the same. After all, movies are a communal experience by design. You’re supposed to get joyously lost in the crowd but that is not possible when there is no crowd to get lost in. 

It’s particularly strange watching a movie by yourself in a theater when the movie in question is a crowd-pleaser. That was the case with the 9:55 PM Monday night screening of 80 For Brady I caught at a local multiplex. 

On Monday night I was ready for some football but I was apparently the only one because my showing was otherwise empty. I found myself in the curious position of watching a crowd-pleaser without a crowd, just a single solitary soul who was pleased and annoyed in roughly equal amounts. 

In its first weekend 80 for Brady attracted a 69 percent female audience. That is low for a lightweight comedy vehicle for four of our most beloved actresses of a certain age—Rita Moreno, the EGOT goddess herself, Sally Field, who we like, we really, really like, “Hanoi” Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. It is extremely high, however, for a football comedy featuring flashy cameos from Rob Gronkowski and Guy Fieri. 

Four of the greatest icons in film history, bona fide national treasures who, individually and collectively, have enriched our culture tremendously and created incredible legacies, have united for an agreeably mediocre laugher that runs the gamut from perfectly acceptable to moderately enjoyable. 

As star-studded comedies about friends who take a wacky trip together go, this is not as good as Girls Trip but decidedly better than the Las Vegas-based comedy where one of the doofuses from LFMAO wiggled his nutsack in a dispirited Robert De Niro’s face.

The members of LMFAO tragically do not appear in 80 for Brady but Academy Award winning master thespian Sally Field DOES triumph in a Guy Fieri-led hot wings contest, accidentally takes powerful edibles and dances multiple times, at least once while high off her ass.

The broad, silly comedy of 80 for Brady comes from old women behaving in an incongruously youthful manner but it also comes from the seeming incongruity of women giddily indulging in historically male pastimes. 

Tomlin leads a ridiculously over-qualified cast as Lou. She’s the quarterback and leader of a quartet of friends who supported her during an ultimately successful battle with Cancer that led to them all accidentally becoming huge fans of the Patriots, particularly quarterback Tom Brady. 

80 for Brady provides a hilariously clumsy and unconvincing origin story for its lead characters’ Tom Brady obsession. Being older women, they seemingly had no interest in sports but they were unable to change the channel on a television during just the right moment and ended up becoming instantly fixated on the Patriots’ handsome back-up quarterback. 

All I know about Tom Brady is that he used to play golf with disgraced, twice-impeached one-term ex-president Donald Trump and looks like he belongs on a recruitment poster for the Nazi Party. 

Brady is in the opening credits for 80 for Brady as an actor as well as a producer. He’s the star of 80 for Brady, the producer of 80 for Brady, the subject of 80 for Brady and the hero of 80 for Brady who inspires other heroes and is, in turn, inspired by their heroism as well. 

In a perhaps related development, 80 for Brady doubles as an effusive feature-length advertisement for Tom Brady the athlete, Tom Brady the man and Tom Brady the brand as well as the NFL. Brady isn’t just a uniquely gifted athlete here: he’s downright magical, the beauty and purity and inspiration of professional sports in its purest, highest form.

80 for Brady understandably highlights the fun of being a fan and the dizzy spectacle of Super Bowl Sunday rather than the horrible brain damage NFL players incur after being hit in the head thousands of times. 

When Lou begins to suspect that her time on earth might once again be limited by disease she convinces her three best friends to join her on a trip to the Super Bowl to see their beloved Tom Brady in what might be his final time at the big game. 

There’s Trish (Jane Fonda), the vixen of the group, a sexpot with a raging libido and a thing for younger men as well as Betty (Sally Field), the responsible one, a numbers-cruncher with a happy if less than exhilarating marriage to fellow Poindexter Mark (Bob Balaban). 

EGOT recipient Rita Moreno rounds out the quartet as Maura, its resident wildcard. She lost her dear husband a year earlier and has been living in a nursing home where she can hide out from the world and flirt with a widower played by Glynn Turman.  

When Lou proposes the ultimate girl’s trip Maura leaps at the chance. At the Super Bowl mischief is afoot. The usually dependable Betty loses the fanny pack containing tickets to the big game during a Guy Fieri-hosted hot wings competition, forcing the quartet to scramble to find four more tickets hours before game-time or an alternate way to get in. 

At a party, the ladies are offered gummy bears and happily accept them only to discover that the candy they happily devoured are not the usual kinds of gummy bears that people hand out individually at parties. 

No, these are gummy bears with THC that makes them behave in a manner that suggests that the screenwriters and stars of 80 for Brady have no firsthand experience with soft drugs. That would be strange because marijuana is extremely popular, particularly in the world of show-business. 

We’re nevertheless not ready for movies where older people accidentally end up taking drugs like marijuana or mushrooms and it doesn’t affect them too much because they have a high threshold and are extremely familiar with its mild effects.

Trish dallies with a hunky retired football player played by silver fox Harry Hamlin while Maura wins a fortune at poker, only to discover that she’s in a charity poker tournament and consequently can’t be used to buy Super Bowl tickets. 

There is never any doubt that our plucky heroes will get into the big game but it wasn’t until the film’s third act that I remembered that I had actually watched the game that makes up much of its climax. 

That’s because I live in Georgia and the 2017 Super Bowl pitted the Patriots against the Atlanta Falcons. I vividly remember the Falcons having a 28 to 3 lead in the third quarter and the sinking feeling in my gut when Brady started to rally and the Pats started to come back. 

I had the same awful feeling in my gut that I did in 2016 watching the results of the presidential election. It was a sinking feeling that defeat was somehow inevitable, that even though everything in the world angrily insisted that my guys were going to win, we’d end up losing all the same. 

Why? It’s because of me. In 80 for Brady, The Patriots win after Lou improbably gives Tom Brady a pep talk. She single-handedly inspires him to score a historic victory through her purity of spirit and child-like hope in him and his abilities. 

On a similar note, I am so hopelessly, deeply fucked and have such bad luck that the mere fact that I wanted the Falcons to win was enough to make them lose. 

I know that’s ridiculous but on some level I genuinely believe that. 

That, weirdly enough, is what 80 for Brady is about: the curious spiritual connection we have with the athletes and entertainers and leaders we love and how it means the world to us even if it is inherently one-sided. 

It makes sense that 80 for Brady is being released around the Super Bowl but it also seems like the kind of thing families watch during Thanksgiving or Christmas because it’s aggressively unobjectionable and has something for everyone and not too much for anyone. 

80 for Brady is an acceptable piece of studio product. Its stars deserve infinitely more but considering the market for movies about older women and the world that we live in, they would probably be willing to settle for even less.