'80 for Brady' Makes a Play for Moviegoers This Weekend
by EG
Hollywood has been struggling to find an alternative to Avatar: The Way of Water to lure viewers to theaters, and its shot this week is 80 for Brady, an unlikely comedy featuring four veteran actresses and recently retired football star Tom Brady. The movie is produced by Brady and is getting mixed reviews. The weekend also features a new film from M. Night Shyamalan, the thriller Knock at the Cabin, which probably has the best chance of finally knocking Avatar out of the top spot. Read on for details.
Via The New York Times.
Tom Brady, the oldest starting quarterback in N.F.L. history, has said he is retiring “for good” at the age of 45. But at a combined age of 335, Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Sally Field and Rita Moreno muscle “80 for Brady,” a comedy about a fan club’s frenetic Super Bowl weekend, over the goal line. The setup is that Lou (Tomlin), who is living with cancer, is adamant that she and her besties will attend a Super Bowl before she returns an urgent message from her oncologist. Betty (Field), a math professor, calculates that they have a .0013% chance of winning a call-in contest to see the 2017 showdown between Brady’s New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons. But wish fulfillment is in their favor, as is the director Kyle Marvin’s choice to treat obstacles like breakaway paper banners to be torn through by its winning team.
This stubbornly charming romp is, quite literally, fan fiction inspired by a group of female friends from North Attleborough, Mass., one of whom had a grandson with the Hollywood connections to pitch their story to Tom Brady’s film production company. Brady serves as one of the movie’s producers, as well as its motivational mascot. In times of need, he pops up as a talking bobblehead who whispers advice, while flashbacks to the game itself hail that year’s victory as one of football’s most memorable comebacks.
Predictability doesn’t scare the screenwriters Sarah Haskins and Emily Halpern, who collaborated previously as writers of “Booksmart.” Their script is a barrage of quirky one-liners that punch up familiar set pieces like an accidental drug bender, a hot wings-eating contest, and a high-stakes card game. It gambles, correctly, that the veteran cast can convince the audience to play along with outlandish contrivances — including an assurance that four seniors in loudly bedazzled jerseys can, when needed, sneak around like ninjas.
The benefit of leads with decades of personal chemistry, plus the classic studio ingénue training to hoof it through corny material, is that Marvin is freed up to lavish attention on his bit players. Even brief parts like a book store clerk or an underpaid worker at a carnival game earn solid snickers from just a sentence or two of dialogue. The only thankless role goes to Sara Gilbert as the daughter tasked to nag Tomlin’s character about her health; Gilbert’s stuck in reality while everyone else is doing jazz hands with Gugu (Billy Porter), the halftime choreographer.
Instead, the more absurd the gag, the better it works. As Trish, a lovelorn author of Rob Gronkowski erotica (sample title: “Between a Gronk and a Hard Place”), Fonda finds herself selecting the perfect Barbarella blonde wig for a romance with a debonair jock played by Harry Hamlin.
Get the rest of the story at The New York Times.