80 for Brady

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There are times when just the four ladies on screen make this mildly amusing, but sadly that's about as entertaining as it gets. The four friends have been following NFL superstar Tom Brady throughout his career and when he, just shy of his 40th birthday, is to play for the "Patriots" in the Super Bowl, they decide - by hook, or by crook - that they are going to make the trip to Houston. Without going into too much detail, they manage to get some tickets and off they go on what becomes the adventure of a lifetime. It's got a bit of romance, a bit of light comedy, a little familial discord and it sets out to demonstrate, clearly, that age is no barrier to people having a good time. The script, though, is really rather poor and though Sally Field and Lily Tomlin do a little better, neither Jane Fonda nor Rita Moreno really have enough to do. It's all a bit, well, bitty - too episodic. It doesn't really flow. We know these folks have all the awards known to man on their mantelpieces, but somehow there is actually rather little star quality on display here. I just didn't think they gelled well at all and there are stereotypes galore as it becomes gradually cheesier and sentimental. It passes ninety minutes OK, but it's not really a cinema film. It will fill a slot on the telly at Christmas easily enough, but otherwise it's unremarkable stuff.

It is very rare for my wife to suggest I watch a sports movie with her. But her interest in the four elderly female stars (well three of them anyway as she hadn’t seem Rita Moreno in very much) overcame her total lack of interest in sports. So off we went. The movie was entertaining but not overly original or riveting. The four leads did adequate an job, and why wouldn’t they with a couple hundred years of acting between them? It was bizarre to see them with their surgically altered smooth skins and younger looks that sort of made it impossible to believe the non-rich characters could all afford the surgeries to get them there. Jane Fonda especially has a china doll appearance, bringing to my mind the 10 year-old girls who are artificially made up by their parents to take part in sexualized beauty contests. I suppose it might be best to wait for this movie to stream somewhere and watch it with friends, perhaps with a few drinks in hand to dull the critical movie critic inside all of us. I thought the most interesting element of the writing was how they reimagined just enough about the facts of the Super Bowl to allow for the ladies to have a small role in the ultimate result. I guess as a New Englander, I am required to recommend the movies to other New Englanders.