April 15, 2023

Film Review – Air (2023)

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The basketball puns have already been done to death, such has been the initial response to Ben Affleck’s Air, and we won’t exhaust them further. But if his latest directorial venture shows us anything – and it shows plenty – it’s that a lot can happen in a movie career in just over a decade. It is, after all, eleven years since the release of his Oscar winner, Argo, and his foray into the world of 1980s basketball comes with a strong sense of him trying to repeat that magic.

The true story this time – another one that doesn’t sound especially promising on paper (like last week’s Tetris) – comes from the world of business. In 1984, Nike was lagging well behind Converse and Adidas when it came to their share of the sports shoe market and, in America, that was driven by basketball. Their marketing team needed to sign a big name, but budgets were tight and the shareholders hard to please. Salesman Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) came up with an idea that could be a sure fire hit – if his CEO, the one-time maverick Phil Knight (Affleck), would back him. All he wanted to do was sign the player everybody knew would be the biggest and best the sport had ever seen. Michael Jordan.

Right from the opening chords of Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing, which is used to back a whole raft of archive footage from the decade, you’re thrust right into the 80s. It’s a soundtrack that never allows us to forget the setting and it’s no exaggeration to say it’s a banger. Affleck chose all the tracks himself and must’ve had a whale of a time doing it. But we have seen him make use of news footage before and that, of course, was in Argo, another true life story and one which saw Affleck take the lead role as well. Here, he’s in a smaller role, but it’s still hard to escape this – and other – parallels or that, just like his 1982 film, Air is an out-and-out crowd pleaser. It’s just for different reasons.

The narrative is essentially propelled by Damon’s Vaccaro, who physically is no example of the benefits of the sporting life promoted by his company. But his gut feeling is sound, even though he faces sizeable opposition from inside Nike, the company’s competitors and savage agent David Falk (Chris Messina) whose mission in life is to get the best deal possible for his client by any means. And we mean “any”. So it’s the plucky salesman versus the rest of the sports shoe world, and it’s no spoiler to say that he eventually wins. He’s not exactly an underdog, but the opposition he faces is fearsome.  Yet has two crucial allies: Jordan’s mother, the savvy Doloris (Viola Davis in formidable form) and the brilliant eccentric Pete (Matthew Maher), a backroom boy obsessed with designing basketball shoes.

Affleck’s big name cast is flawless, from his Branson-esque CEO to Damon’s almost evangelical salesman and Jason Bateman as marketing supremo, Rob Strasser, who has the frustrating role of being stuck between the two of them. But it’s the smaller roles that we find the most riches. In addition to Davis, Messina has a wonderfully manic energy as the voracious agent and Maher is sublime in a role that every character actor in Hollywood must have been chasing. He makes it his own. Yet the person who’s noticeably absent from proceedings is Michael Jordan himself. Fleeting glimpses of the back of his head and the occasional word on the phone are all we get but, in truth, it’s not his story. What we’re watching – as an impassioned Damon explains – is the prelude to what he would become. And it makes for a superbly entertaining, engaging film. There’s no superheroes, no massive battles, no spectacular visual effects and no superpowers. Just talk. And it works 100%.

★★★★★

Drama | Cinemas, 5 April 2023 | Warner Brothers | Cert: 15 | Dir: Ben Affleck | Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Chris Messina, Viola Davis, Chris Tucker and Matthew Maher.

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