A movie like Air has a few problems but it’s one of those stranger than fiction stories that draws you in on the premise and leaves you entertained throughout the entire movie. It’s hard to believe in 2023 that in the early 1980s, Nike was struggling. Located outside of Beaverton, Oregon, the company that mostly manufactured shoes at the time was struggling while the popularity of Adidas, Converse and Reebok, which were able to attract the bigger athletes.
It’s 1984, a notable year in many ways as that is considered one of the most definitive years of the decade. However, Nike is close to have to discontinue its basketaball shoe division to low sales. In fact, they’re at the bottom. Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) is a talent scout. He travels around but people joke with him for his poor health and physique. But one thing people can agree with is that Sonny knows sports and how to spot an athlete.
One night he watches highlights of Michael Jordan who is considered one of the top picsk of the 1984 NBA draft and then an Arthur Ashe commercial for the Head tennis rackets. He gets an idea. Rather than try to entice three basketball players to show off their shoes, make a shoe for one player. And use Jordan. Of course, the executives at Nike, CEO and co-founder Phil Knight (Ben Affleck), and Marketing VP Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) don’t know about that as they know they can’t get passed Jordan’s agent David Falk (Chris Messina).
Sonny is friends with George Raveling (Marlon Wayans) who coached Jordan in the Olympics and they discuss ways to court Jordan. In a bold move, Sonny travels all the way across the country to Wilmington, N.C. to speak with Jordan’s mother, Deloris (Viola Davis) to attract the Jordans to Nike while telling her how Adidas and Converse will treat Jordan.
But despite Falk’s opposition, the Jordans arrange to meet at Nike as they get Peter Moore (Matthew Maher) to design a prototype. They also plan on using Nke executive Howard White (Chris Tucker) to help sit in on the meeting to help with the Jordans as Howard is black and the rest of the meeting in the meeting room will be white. It’s a fascinating way but you can also see the Jordans see right through it but they’d rather talk to Howard anyway.
Affleck, who directed as well as acted, manages to weave an entertaining story about the people behind the shoe. And you’d never think a movie about a shoe would be as good as Affleck and the cast make it. Davis gives a nice small performance as Deloris who knows that these shoe companies are looking to exploit Michael so she can get what she can out of them. However, she isn’t looking to use her son as a cash cow. She still has his best interests at heart.
As for Michael himself, most of the time where he appears on scene, his back and head is turned toward away from the camera. Of you see him with his face off screen. Dennis Young plays Michael and only says one word on the telephone. This could be annoying but it’s shot in a way that we never notice. As crazy as it sounds this isn’t Michael’s story even though archival footage of him is used throughout.
Both Affleck and Damon do well in their respective roles. This is the eighth movie the two have done together since School Ties in 1992. Damon has the more difficult role of playing Sonny while Phil seems more like a supporting character. In real life, Strasser was about twice the size of Bateman but I think it can be forgiven because Bateman captures the essence of a marketing executive who’s put his work ahead of everything else, and this can break his career if it fails.
I really liked the casting of Maher as Moore. The character actor has appeared in movies directed by both Affleck and his friend and other collaborator Kevin Smith. When we first see Moore, he is using a skateboard out in the parking lot. He has a potbelly and male pattern baldness. Like Sonny, he’s out of shape. But he’s developing athletic shoes. The irony of a bunch of people standing around in offices and labs looking over how to design and market shoes for athletic purposes can’t be lost on many. Maybe that’s why they cast Bateman as Strasser so people would think that someone was serious about good health. (There’s one scene of Sonny preparing to job but stopping not even 100 meters completed.) It’s like the olden days when people were allowed to smoke in hospitals and often many nurses and doctors did it.
This brings me a problem I have with this movie since it’s set about 40 years in the past and thus is a period piece. Affleck and the numerous producers load the movie down with so much music from the 1980s, that it seems to be overkill. I’ve been noticing this happening more and more with movies like Cocaine Bear and others. Yeah, I know Afflack and Damon grew up in the 1980s. I did too. But you wish they could have used the music more sparingly and included more obscure songs from the era.
In Stranger Things, the use of Olivia Newton-John’s “Twist of Fate” played during a dance and it evoked the innocence of youth during the early 1980s. I like Dire Straits “Money for Nothing” but here it seems like it’s overused. Yet, the use of music is a small thing that can be overlooked.
Overall, it’s a great movie. And Affleck, himself, has proven to be a very good director. I know people have criticized his acting and a running joke was that Damon wrote Good Will Hunting all by himself back in the day. But you can see that Affleck is really showing his talents as a director, despite the disjointed Live by Night.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 