TBD | Running apparel company Nike aims to transition to basketball by signing rookie Michael Jordan. Directed by Ben Affleck Starring Matt Damon, Jason Bateman, and Ben Affleck Review by Jon Kissel |
Before we get to the late hole-card reveal of Mama Jordan-demanded profit sharing, Air is the kind of movie that Affleck and Damon and any Gen X film fan laments the dissolution of. This is a film whose scenes are meetings and phone calls, catnip to the kind of viewer who thought the best version of expensive fantasy TV show Game of Thrones was two people talking in a room. These scenes are reliably entertaining and propulsive, thanks to the aw-shucks self-deprecation of Damon that sits so comfortably alongside his professional competence, and a cast of supporting characters who capably bounce off of him. Chris Messina as Jordan’s agent David Falk is a vulgar dynamo straight out of Succession, Jason Bateman’s fellow executive provides an earnest counterweight to Damon’s certitude, and Viola Davis, playing Jordan’s mother, supplies exactly the kind of dignity and poise that what one would expect from her. Chris Tucker as another executive is the outlier, ported in from a different movie. Affleck’s Knight continues the trend from The Last Duel, where Affleck plays eccentric characters that are aiming for scene-stealing, though his Dionysian medieval lord in The Last Duel puts Knight to shame. A movie as tied to Nike as this one is limited in how much fun it can poke at the big man, but Air at least is able to get away with making Knight a cautious skeptic and a recognizable person instead of the flattering magnate that we might have gotten.
If Air works as entertainment and largely understands and avoids the worse version of itself, it’s less successful as a character study or a generator of tension and catharsis. Vaccaro is introduced as a problem gambler, but this doesn’t impede any of the events of the film. It’s only introduced as a way to complicate the character’s wisdom, and is too tidy by half. If this is the only arc that the film is going to be invested in, it could’ve been more complex. Affleck and Damon are renowned sports fans, and no doubt felt that they had to bring some of those rhythms to a film about sports economics. Here, that’s the big pitch in the boardroom, where the home team starts slowly but then puts it all together for a fourth quarter miracle. This entire sequence is bad, from the way it undercuts Bateman’s character and Knight as sweaty boobs to the rambling nature of Vaccaro’s summing-up plea to the Jordan family. This speech needs to convince the viewer as much as it convinces Jordan. Instead, it fails on the former and succeeds on the latter only because history demands it.
Air saves its momentum by giving Davis the final say, and the film justifies its existence by pinning this event as the start of a new era in athletes deservedly earning more of the revenue they generate. That this comes so late in Air’s runtime practically qualifies it as a twist. Everyone’s immediately on board with it, allowing Nike personnel to get their upset and Jordan to immediately cement his place in history before he plays his first NBA game. Everybody wins, except for the Germans at Adidas who may or may not have been Nazis. This is a scenario I hope gets recreated for Artists Equity, especially when we’re living through a moment of maximal studio short-sightedness and greed. It’d be nice if Affleck’s next project celebrates something more substantial than the untroubled transition of millionaires to billionaires. B-