BEFORE: Yes, we're still in the "Lead-in to Horror Movies" week, but let's not forget that football season has already started. Yes, I'm aware this is a Super Bowl-themed movie, and that usually happens in February (it used to be January, whatever happened to that?) but as you may know, I'm always a little busy in February with other concerns. What do Black History and football have in common? I celebrate them on MY schedule, sorry. Plus, I have no idea if I can work this one in during the February chain, even if I could put the romance chain on pause, do I want to do that? The linking says this film goes here, so it goes here. (I just recorded "Stanley & Iris" off of PBS, that could be a romance that would link to this film via Jane Fonda, but I'm not going to re-organize things now, plus, come on, that's only half the battle, I need an intro AND an outro.)
Jane Fonda carries over from "Better Living Through Chemistry".
THE PLOT: A group of friends make it their life-long mission to go to the Super Bowl and meet NFL superstar Tom Brady.
AFTER: I have to keep reminding myself, this is a CURRENT release - this film came out in 2023, so I'm not late, despite the fact that it's set at the Super Bowl in 2017. Man, what a stroke of bad luck, I mean, sure, it was the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history, with the Patriots coming back from being over two touchdowns down (or the worst loss ever if you're an Atlanta Falcons fan, I guess...). Movies take a long time to make, so yeah, it makes sense that the movie might be released six years after the fact, but since then Tom Brady retired twice and changed teams once, so could this possibly still be relevant? Just feels like we're closing the door on the stable after the horse already left, that's all.
Ah, this is based on a true story - apparently there was a group of four eighty-something women from the Boston area who somehow found their way to the Super Bowl that year. We see a clip of them at the end of the film, and I'm sure they're wonderful people and great grandmothers and such, and congrats for being active Patriots fans in your golden years, but be prepared that they don't look like Jane Fonda and Sally Field, they just look like regular senior citizens. Umm, if I'm being honest, Jane Fonda doesn't look much like Jane Fonda either, these days, I don't know if it's too much botox or what, but she looks kind of like a mannequin, sorry. The other actresses here were less afraid to show their age, and I think that's kind of healthier. Yes, I realize that regular people don't have a team of make-up artists and costumers and hairdressers to make them look good on camera, and really, it's all about looking good on camera, right? (But, should it be?)
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the four real seniors who went to the Super Bowl didn't encounter such madcap adventures on their way to the Big Game - they probably just won that contest, went to the game, had a great time and then cashed in by selling their story to Hollywood. Good for them! But then a bunch of comedy screenwriters took a swing at their story and "punched it up", to the point where it's now absolute nonsense. Hey, what other mischief can we have these ladies engage in, because we've got about 10 minutes of story here, and we need like a 100-minute movie?" So the film keeps throwing obstacle after obstacle in their way to try to create some drama, and then every time the women get painted into a corner, there also has to be a way out, some even more hackneyed solution that will get them into the stadium, or up into the skybox, and then into the control room so one of them can give a pep talk directly to Tom Brady. Come ON!
Betty gets caught up in a hot wings eating contest, Trish makes an impromptu appearance to promote her Gronkowski erotic fiction book and falls for an ex-NFL player, Maura gets involved in a high-stakes poker game, and they all take CBD gummies by accident and go on a drug trip. Ha ha, what wacky adventures for our stoned grannies! But there's SO much confusion at every possible stage, and these comic situations are wildly inconsistent - first we learn that Betty gets involved in the hot wings contest just because she's hungry, then we learn that she's actually GREAT at eating hot wings, then we learn that this is because she can't taste anything any more, and THEN we learn that she WAS affected by the spicy wings, but she was only pretending to not be affected. Well, which is it, because those are four completely DIFFERENT explanations for why this stupid thing happened, and really, we barely need one of them. Pick one and stick to it, that's all I ask.
Same thing with the poker game - Maura gets into it when she's high, so it really doesn't have to make sense, but first she doesn't know what she's doing, then she does, she's a great poker player but then she isn't, or maybe her dead husband was a terrible player but thought incorrectly that he was good at gambling, and then she doesn't know what she's doing again, but she wins, then finds out she's playing for charity so she doesn't really win. God, it's just three minutes of the movie, but it still manages to be all over the damn place. And it's like this across the board, with every single plot point being contradicted by something else that comes later.
We won the tickets, we didn't win the tickets, I bought the tickets - so we've got the tickets, we lost the tickets, we found the tickets - the tickets are fake but we can still get in. Why is everything so damn complicated and wishy-washy? Right off the bat, we need something quirky about how these four women watch a football game, so there's some complicated ritual they have to go through at kick-off where Trish needs to be in the dining room, Betty needs to be on a ladder, Maura needs to be drinking tea and Lou needs to spill a bowl of tortilla chips - absolutely NOBODY watches a game this way, and they do this because of some Patriots game years ago when this happened and the Pats won? This doesn't make any sense because Tom Brady won a LOT of games after that one, and even these fans know that what they do in their living room has NO effect on the outcome of a football game, but they do it anyway? Wouldn't they get tired of buying chips every week that are just going to be spilled on the floor and not eaten? It's clear that screenwriters just don't understand how people watch a football game (or play poker, or buy Super Bowl tickets, or eat hot wings) - they just make the things happen that need to happen to fill up the movie. No no, don't bother doing any research about how things work...
Yes, security during a football game, especially a Super Bowl, is tight. So if you don't have an authenticated ticket, you are NOT getting into that stadium. Full stop. But there are at least three techniques used here by our intrepid quartet to get past security and then to prevent being thrown out of the stadium. These will probably NOT work for regular people, or for anyone in the real world. SPOILER ALERT - the man Maura met during the poker game turns out to be the choreographer for the halftime show, who apparently is able to get anyone into the Super Bowl if he just SAYS they're part of his crew. Uh-uh, even if they were back-up dancers or consultants or just seat-fillers, they would STILL need to show a pass or some kind of I.D., just proving they know a few dance moves wouldn't cut it, sorry. Yes, I know this is a comedy but even a comedy with a lot of gags needs to be anchored somewhere close to reality.
Look, I really tried to turn off the logical part of my brain and I just tried to have some fun with the part that was left. And if you don't care about Nitpick Points like I do, maybe you can just relax and have a good time here. Similar to the Super Bowl, I guess - there are people who are SO into football and all the plays and the rules and the odds that they can't just switch all that off and enjoy a day at the stadium. That's like me, but for movies. I can't just ignore the fact that the plot points don't make sense, any more than a hardcore football fan could ignore a bad call by a referee on a fumble. (Hey, I know sports words!). The game has to work according to a set of rules, and so does a movie plot, otherwise we have chaos. And this film is 90 minutes of chaos, sorry, so here we go:
NITPICK POINT: The contestants in the Hot Wings eating contest are seen putting hot sauce on each wing. Wha? How could the contest possibly allow this, what's to prevent each person from pretending to put a lot on, then missing the wing with the sauce thus applying only a little bit? The heat should have been added during the preparation, anyway - the standard application of hot sauce to a wing comes shortly after frying the wings, when they get tossed in sauce, and thus the contest could control exactly how hot each wing is on the Scoville scale, to maintain the fairness of the competition. So let's say this happened, but then there's no reason for the contestants to add MORE hot sauce from a bottle just before eating, this would only make eating the wing more difficult, and introduce a random element. Nope, no way. Look, I don't eat spicy food myself, I stick to BBQ wings only - but I'm sure there are strict rules for how eating challenges work.
NITPICK POINT #2: Across the board, security is incredibly lax at the Super Bowl. Think about that, how many millions are spent by the NFL and the TV Network to make sure that nothing interferes with this TV program? And nobody takes their job more seriously than security guards, especially in this post-9/11 world. And then not only do these women somehow find four empty seats together (also impossible, I'll bet) but they're able to sit in them for some time, nobody checks their tickets which they don't have or tries to show them to their correct seats, and the people who are supposed to sit in those seats don't ever show up? Are they all in the bathroom together or something, or did they all oversleep on the day of the biggest game? Some family emergency prevented four people from using the tickets they paid thousands of dollars for? Give me a break. They're busted when the security guard from before sees them on the Jumbotron, but then they know somebody else who can get them into a Skybox, so they just keep failing upwards.
NITPICK POINT #3: Sure, there's this thing called The NFL Experience, or the FanZone or whatever, and I'm sure it's like a Comic-Con for football, lots of booths and exhibits and fun activities taking place at the stadium the day before the game. Fine, whatever, maybe there's a hot wings contest, who cares. But is there a book-based booth called "The Read Zone"? I'm betting not, and even if there WERE, would it feature a self-published book based on Gronkowski erotic fiction? Again, probably no. If there were a "Read Zone" you have to figure it would be there to promote child literacy or something, and R-rated romance novels would be a no-no. But it's just one more example of how this film can't keep its own story straight. Things happen this way because the writer needed them to happen this way to keep things moving in every direction at once and fill up 100 minutes.
Here's a real shock, Tom Brady was a producer on this movie via his production company, 199 Productions - so yeah, as you might imagine there's an impetus to portray him in a positive light. Also, it must be good to be the G.O.A.T. because that means you can finance a film about yourself (starring YOU as yourself) and your biggest game performance and you can hire some of the most acclaimed actresses (12 Oscar nominations, 5 Oscar wins and 1 EGOT winner) to play your fans, then also some of the best comedians (Patton Oswalt, Ron Funches) will line up to play the smaller roles, and you'll get more famous, just when you thought you couldn't get any more famous-er.
I grew up in Patriots territory (two towns over from Foxborough), but I'd already moved to NYC by the time Tom Brady hit the scene - I watched my parents become Pats fans later on, due to his great success of course, so I've got no issue with older people becoming football fans later in life, despite not ever following the game much Pre-Brady. But then I also remember my parents not knowing what to do after he retired the first time, and popped up again in Tampa Bay. It's a stumper, do you keep watching the Patriots without him or do you start rooting for the Bucs? Ah, the perils of being a sports fan. I doubt, however, that anyone would start wearing jerseys that were half New England and half Tampa Bay, that doesn't make any sense - unless the two teams are playing each other, and then, who DO you root for?
I also worked in the warehouse of an appliance store during the first real Patriots Super-Bowl run, which was back in 1986. That was a wild time, as with each playoff win more people came in the store to buy VCRs and big-screen TVs. And the big slogan was "Squish the Fish" when the Pats played the Dolphins for the AFC Championship, and that was replaced by "Bury the Bears" for the Super Bowl. (EDIT: Actually it was "Berry the Bears" but I don't remember why... The head coach was named Raymond Berry or something?) Yeah, the Pats did NOT bury the Bears, which made me wonder how many people in the Boston area then tried to return those big-screen TVs when the Bears won the Super Bowl. It was a different time...the Patriots entered a long dormant hibernation period then, until Brady hit the scene. The Red Sox sort of did the same thing after they lost the World Series in 1986...
Quick update, I submitted my NP about the hot wings to the IMDB under the "goofs" section for this film, and I got it posted! This might be a first for me! After almost 15 years of being very nitpicky about movies, I finally noticed something significant (OK, kind of) that nobody else cared about! Victory is mine!
Also starring Lily Tomlin (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Rita Moreno (last seen in "West Side Story" (2021)), Sally Field (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Tom Brady (last seen in "Ted 2"), Billy Porter (last seen in "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?"), Harry Hamlin (last seen in "The Meddler"), Guy Fieri (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Alex Moffat (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Rob Corddry (last seen in "The Layover"), Glynn Turman (last seen in "How Stella Got Her Groove Back"), Ron Funches (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), Bob Balaban (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Jimmy O. Yang (last seen in "Juliet, Naked"), Matt Lauria (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Sara Gilbert (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys"), Sally Kirkland (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Andy Richter (last seen in "Conan O'Brien Can't Stop"), Gus Kenworthy, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Marshawn Lynch, Patton Oswalt (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Retta (last seen in "Father Figures"), Danny Amendola, Julian Edelman, Rob Gronkowski (last seen in "Boss Level"), Bonnie Hellman (last seen in "Amsterdam"), Amber Chardae Robinson (last seen in "Judas and the Black Messiah"), Vishal Patel, Charlie Morgan Patton, Rebecca Field (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Lucius Baybak (last seen in "Endings, Beginnings"), Nick Lane, Daniella Covino, Marc Rebillet, Matt Porter, Stephanie Nash, Arnold Schrager, Noah Staggs (last seen in "Fruitvale Station"), Amy Tolsky, with archive footage of Bill Belichick, Terry Bradshaw (last seen in "Father Figures").
RATING: 6 out of 10 sequined jerseys
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