98 min | PG-13 | February 3, 2023 | Paramount Pictures
Four screen legends fly to Houston to watch Tom Brady win a Super Bowl. They lie, they take edibles, they enter a hot wing eating contest. The movie loves them more than it trusts them.
Four lifelong friends in their eighties build their entire fan lives around the New England Patriots and Tom Brady. When the team reaches the Super Bowl in Houston, they pool their nerve and chase tickets they cannot afford to a game they cannot stop watching. The premise is a road trip wrapped in football fandom. What the film is really about is the right of old women to want things loudly and chase them without apology. The script understands that thesis and then hands it the broadest sitcom machinery available to deliver it.
Lily Tomlin plays Lou as the ringleader carrying a private fear she keeps hidden from the others. Tomlin lets the worry leak through the bravado in small moments and grounds the group. Jane Fonda plays Trish writing fan romance novels and flirting with a former player, and she commits to the bit without winking at it. Rita Moreno plays Maura sharp and grieving and ready to gamble. Sally Field plays Betty as the anxious overthinker who finds her nerve at a hot wing contest spiked with ghost pepper. The four actors build a friendship that feels lived in even when the screenplay reaches for the easy gag.
Kyle Marvin directs from a script by Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins, and the staging treats every set piece as a sketch with a clean punchline. The editing cuts to reaction shots on a metronome and never lets a joke sit long enough to surprise. Marvin frames the actual game footage and the Houston crowd in flat television coverage that flattens the climax into a broadcast. The score nudges every emotional beat with strings that announce the feeling before the actors earn it. Tom Brady appears as himself and Billy Porter shows up as a flamboyant party host named Gugu, and both are deployed as cameos rather than characters.
The film works as a vehicle for watching four masters do light comedy together. It does not work as anything more demanding than that. The jokes about edibles and dating apps and dance-offs land at the level of a network pilot, and the movie never asks its leads to do anything they cannot do in their sleep. The talent on screen deserves a script with teeth. This one settles for charm and lets the women carry the rest.