‘Air’ Review: A Bare-Bones Story Elevated by an Amazing Script
Ben Affleck as Phil Knight in AIR Photo: COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS © AMAZON CONTENT SERVICES LLC
In many ways, Ben Affleck’s Air can be seen as Jaws set in the world of basketball shoes. Both stories are pretty bare-bones but vastly elevated by a great script and great direction, prioritizing characters and their interactions over a complicated plot; they also have a McGuffin at the very center of their stories that doesn’t show up until the third act.
Air stars Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro, an employee at the Nike company whose job is actually hard to describe. In 1984, Nike was struggling to compete with the two big fish in the sea, Adidas and Converse, in their stakes in the NBA. Basketball had just become the big thing again with the rise of the LA Lakers and particularly its two major players, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird (see HBO’s Winning Time if you want a deep dive into that crazy story), but the NBA still had a lot of untapped potential. Michael Jordan showed them the way in later years, and Damon’s Sonny is the only one who can see he actually has a chance to become that great.
Jordan is already been sought after by Adidas and Converse, and Nike can’t really be competitive with them. That’s when Sonny and his gut feeling come in and try to court his mother into giving them a seat at the table. The rest is history, of course, as Nike builds the most famous shoe of all time, the Air Jordan, around the figure of this one rookie. It is not a particularly complicated story, which is why it took a great script by Alex Convery (also his first writing credit) and a director with a savvy eye — with a great underdog story of his own — to put out a compelling narrative that managed to get us rooting for the characters and kept the suspense up in key moments.
Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro in AIR Photo: ANA CARBALLOSA © AMAZON CONTENT SERVICES LLC
Ben Affleck also stars in the movie as Nike CEO Phil Knight, along with Chris Tucker as Howard White, Jason Bateman as Rob Strasser, Chris Messina as David Falk, and Viola Davis as Deloris Jordan. Affleck, in his first directing effort since 2016’s Live By Night, proves once again to be a top-tier director when he has his heart into it by having one simple priority — make it entertaining. That, above all else, is the key ingredient to Air‘s success; it is extremely entertaining because it’s funny, relatable, engaging, and just 100 minutes long. It moves fast and steady, taking the audience on a ride that is more of a road trip than an adventure.
Matt Damon plays the lead and gives one of his best performances in recent memory. Aside from Stillwater, it’s been a minute since he’s played the sole lead in a film, and he definitely proved he’s still got it. He is able to carry the entire film on his shoulders, and though he gets some help along the way through his interactions with the people around him, namely Jason Bateman and Chris Tucker (who practically steals the show with his charm), it is he who we are rooting for to succeed, and everyone else who we are wishing would shut it and let him talk.
Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro and Viola Davis as Deloris Jordan in AIR Photo: COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS © AMAZON CONTENT SERVICES LLC
One of the problems of the movie, though, is how they film around Michael Jordan. We never really see his face, and the character doesn’t really say more than two or three words in the film; it’s understandable why, of course, and the Jordan family probably didn’t want him to appear either. In fact, the story is told through the lens of how Michael’s mother was a key player in signing the deal with Nike. But, even as someone who is not familiar with Michael Jordan beyond what Netflix’s The Last Dance covered, it is upsetting that he practically wouldn’t say a word in all of the meetings he attends in the film. It’s a flaw of the design, of course, and something the filmmakers and we as an audience have to live with because there probably was no other way to make the film.
At its core, Air is an underdog story; it is something we have seen before, and even a story we are overly familiar with. It took a director with a great eye to put out a very entertaining movie, and Ben Affleck did it.
Air is currently playing in theaters worldwide.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
