Stream It Or Skip It: ‘80 for Brady’ on Paramount+, A Ladies-Bonding Football Comedy That Fumbles the Ball

The thought of putting Rita Moreno, Jane Fonda, Sally Field and Lily Tomlin in the same film is a real head-exploder – you know, four Hollywood peers and legends, together at last! Too bad that film is 80 for Brady (now streaming on Prime Video), a barely directed, barely written drivel-comedy that further aggrandizes future NFL hall-of-famer Tom Brady by casting the aforementioned four beloved and illustrious actresses as the guy’s mega-superfans, who do everything in their power to see their cherished New England Patriots quarterback play in Super Bowl LI in person (and yes, that’s the one with the all-timer of a comeback that rendered the 2016-17 Atlanta Falcons football’s all-time greatest f—ups). The question here is, can we endure the greezy NFL propaganda and Guy Fieri cameos long enough to appreciate the effort its four stars exert? Maybe. But it’s a pretty big ask.

80 FOR BRADY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Let’s talk about these characters. Betty (Field) is a former MIT professor and statistics guru who’s been married to Mark (Bob Balaban) for more than 50 years. Maura (Moreno) is a recent widow who lives in a nursing home by choice, even though she still owns a house and is perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Trish (Fonda) is single with a long string of failed relationships behind her, and a former TV-commercial star who now writes lusty Patriots fan fiction focusing on goofball bruiser tight end Rob Gronkowski. And Lou (Tomlin) is kind of the linchpin of this foursome; when she was recovering from chemotherapy 16 years prior, she and the other three happened to have the TV on when Tom Brady (Tom Brady) took his first NFL snap. It was love at first sight. Get a load of that. Whatta hunk. One million heart emojis. We could really watch this football stuff. Etc.

We learn about a lot of this stuff because the women speak in Catchupese, an exposition-heavy language that exists in movies to tell us, the audience, about the characters, and utterly fails to resemble language that real people speak in real life. We meet them in 2017, and the four ladies have their matching Brady/Pats gear and indulge silly game-day superstitions where, in order to will the Pats to win, one of them has to sit on a ladder while watching the game, and a bowl of chips needs to be spilled before kickoff, stuff like that. It’s the AFC championship game, and the Pats roll over the Pittsburgh Steelers. Next stop, the Super Bowl. And you know what, nobody here is getting any younger, so wouldn’t it be great if they found a way to go? Problem is, it’s prohibitively expensive. But a couple of sports-talk TV guys are hosting a contest to win four tickets, which are probably worth more than an entire year’s worth of production costs for their crappy show, but never mind. So our protagonists enter, and wouldn’t you know it – Lou gathers them together to inform them that they won and are going to Houston and will be in the same building as their godly all-time golden god-boy of football, Tom Brady. How about that.

And so they go to the game and the Pats win in spectacular fashion, hooray, and everyone is thrilled as shit, the end. No! The movie isn’t even one-third over yet, and this isn’t the type of movie that avoids contriving a dumpsterful of idiotic hijinks to humiliate its cast of true professionals. Thankfully, nobody falls into a pool, loses her pants or pukes in front of a roomful of people. But there is a hot-wing eating contest, the consumption of too many weed gummies, brushes with celebrities, grotesque product placement, jokes in which a fanny pack is referred to as a “strap-on,” a security guard who takes his job way too seriously, stuff like that. It’s some real who-writes-this-shit type of shit. And this is where one might write a line about throwing a yellow flag on this movie for committing an unsportsmanlike conduct foul, but let’s not sink to the movie’s sub-basic level of comedy, OK?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The last time we saw a superstar athlete play himself in a high-profile film it was Space Jam: A New Legacy, which looks like Vertigo in comparison. As far as football movies go, Kurt Warner biopic American Underdog is drearily mediocre, but far more preferable than this.

Performance Worth Watching: Tomlin has always been my favorite among the principals of this cast – she’s so… wily – and I’m inclined to say she endures this godawful material with credibility intact. 

Memorable Dialogue: Maura and her nursing-home friend and former football player Mickey (Glynn Turman) talk about the game: 

Mickey: My coach always said I had great feet.

Maura: My husband said I had great feet. (Pregnant pause) He really liked feet. 

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: First of all, the makers of 80 for Brady are only further traumatizing poor Matt Ryan, who surely wants to nuke this movie from orbit. Although I don’t really sympathize with guys who make millions of dollars to lose football games in historical fashion, I sympathize with that assessment: This movie is awful, excruciating dreck – from the writers of Booksmart, even, a movie that was fresh, funny and exciting. 80 for Brady trots out one ancient joke after another, then drenches it all in saccharine syrup so there’s some emotional stakes. It’s corny and phony and drippy and only the die-hardest of Brady’s fans wouldn’t be turned off by the blatant fellating of the superstar quarterback and his numerous achievements (and the NFL in general). Yuck. 

Of course, the movie isn’t about Brady necessarily; it’s inspired by a group of real-life women of a certain vintage who bonded over their superfandom and wore matching “Over 80 for Brady” T-shirts. Adorable story, really, in all earnestness. Too bad that story becomes a series of slipshod situations that are desperately thirsty for laughs and therefore about as plausible as stumbling across a Burger King on the Ross Ice Shelf. It’s painful to see Field, Moreno, Fonda and Tomlin wade through this bottom-of-the-trough quasi-comedic slop. Their goal seems to be simply surviving the entire endeavor, a feeling those of us watching the movie know all too well.  

Our Call: Who wouldn’t want to see this powerhouse ensemble work together? But not like this. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.