Movie Review: Air

There are some who will roll their eyes at Air and dismiss director Ben Affleck’s latest film as nothing more than a 90-minute Nike commercial. And they’d be wrong – it’s actually a two-hour Nike commercial.

But corporate lionizing aside, the naysayers might want to reconsider dismissing Air. The latest in an ongoing line of “how they made it” movies celebrating heroic entrepreneurs and executives – the others include last month’s Tetris and the upcoming Flamin’ Hot and Blackberry –  the movie is certainly a brand deposit for a multibillion-dollar business. But it’s also a smart and funny celebration of skilled people doing their jobs well. It’s Moneyball with high tops.

Matt Damon stars as Sonny Vaccaro, a mid-level employee at Nike, which as the film opens in 1984, is a third-tier shoe company having no success with its basketball line. Vaccaro’s been brought over by Nike CEO Phil Knight (Affleck) to forge deals with college and professional basketball players, but everyone prefers to go with Converse or Adidas. After other execs pick middling players to consider tossing deals to, Vaccaro pins his hope on a rookie third-round draft pick from the Chicago Bulls named Michael Jordan. And if you don’t know where this is going, you’ve been checked out of American culture for the last 40 years.

The daunting task for Air is to build suspense out of a story whose outcome is apparent just by glancing at audience members’ feet, with stakes that won’t likely matter to anyone who is not an exec pulling in millions a quarter. Nearly everyone knows that Air Jordans revolutionized the world of footwear while also netting Jordan his own avalanche of cash via his deal with the company – a first for athletes. The challenge facing Alex Convery’s script is how to engage audiences and make them care whether a corporation and professional ball player can make millions. 

But, like Moneyball – a baseball movie that built drama out of statistics and front-office negotiations – Air works because it grounds its story in compelling characters. Vaccaro is first glimpsed in a casino; he’s a gambler, and his pursuit of Jordan is based in both his convictions on the player’s talent but also his love of taking a risk. While Air Jordans will make millions for Nike and its executives, Convery’s script wisely centers the focus not on the executives but on the everyday workers who have everything to lose. There’s Vaccaro, portrayed by Damon with a paunch and penchant for khakis, and marketing exec Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), a divorced dad whose relationship with his daughter will be damaged if he loses his job (a very real possibility, since Vaccaro is betting everything in the basketball department on Jordan). 

It’s compelling, and the best portions of the film feature the men toiling to land the deal. Affleck’s best films have been fascinated with talented people doing their jobs – whether that’s the cops of Gone Baby Gone, the robbers of The Town, or the studio execs and government agents of Argo. Convery’s screenplay is funny and smart, and Affleck understands just how much goodwill his talented cast brings. No one rips into a stirring inspirational monologue like Damon – who gets to deliver several – and Bateman is cinema’s best deliverer of smart-ass snark. Chris Tucker unleashes his charm as an executive with a knack for befriending players’ families, and Matthew Maher is very funny as a passionate shoe designer given the chance to make his masterpiece. Chris Messina is also having the time of his life delivering profane screeds as Jordan’s agent, whose love-hate relationship with Vaccaro provides some of the film’s biggest laughs.

Chris Tucker in “Air.” Photo by Courtesy of Prime.

The film wisely never shows Jordan’s face, instead keeping him in the shadows or in profile; casting an actor to play the larger-than-life superstar would be too distracting. Instead, the film positions Jordan’s mother, Deloris, as the true brains of the operation. Played by Viola Davis – whose presence is shorthand for power and dignity – it gives the film a sense of weight and a human counterpoint to the corporate machinations. Yes, Nike might make millions off the shoes, but Deloris Jordan is determined to make sure her son and his family can see a portion of that, instead of being exploited by the corporation. 

Still, it’s hard to escape the fact that audiences are rooting for a corporation that went on to make billions off basketball shoes, and that Michael Jordan – as the film reveals at the end – makes $400 million a year in passive income from them. But Air manages to mostly keep the C-suite shenanigans to a minimum, with middle management – as close as this film gets to having Average Joes as characters – at its center. It never can quite escape feeling like a giant bit of marketing for the shoe company – the film structures many of its scenes around Nike’s values, which hang on Knight’s wall – but Affleck is also careful to let the air out of Nike’s Pumps when possible. The director portrays Knight and, while the CEO is presented in a near-mythic light sometimes, Affleck has fun with some of his absurdities – his fondness for bad haircuts and putting his bare feet on desks, bad taste in car colors, and a ham-fisted delivery during an important pitch meeting. 

Affleck’s documentary-like style keeps the energy up; a sequence where the entire team pitches Jordan’s family on Nike is rich with suspense and will feel completely genuine to anyone who’s sat in such meetings. And lest audiences think “all this for shoes?”, the director reminds us that the 1980s were a time when commodities were the culture. The film is packed to bursting with on-point needle drops; clips from 1984’s hit films; glimpses of the most popular toys, games, and fast food. What was the 1980s if not a culture of consumption – and who were the legends but those who rose to the top of the sales charts? It’s cynical, but at least it’s a point of view.

It’s not subtle or deep, and a tendency to stick to its surface pleasures keeps Air from being a truly great film. But it is a very good one, and one of the most entertaining movies of the year so far.