Air: An Insightful Look At The Birth Of A Brand

Within the last 40 years, the sports marketing industry has gone through major changes that are designed to benefit the athletes. One of those major changes is that athletes now receive a piece of the revenue from the sale of things that are branded with their likeness. The person who pioneered this was Michael Jordan with his Air Jordan line of basketball shoes at Nike. Air tells the story about how this line came into existence with a great soundtrack, great acting performances, and a sense of humor that makes the cast endearing.

Air tells the story of Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) who was brought in to save the fledgling basketball division at Nike by CEO Phil Knight (Ben Affleck). Sonny wants to spend the entire budget recruiting Michael Jordan instead of signing a few midrange players, a plan which receives considerable pushback, however, he reaches out to the parents of Jordan (Viola Davis and Julius Tennon) to try to push the plan through anyway. Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, Marlon Wayans, and Matthew Maher also star.

The movie is shot in an interesting way where it feels like it has the gravitas of The Social Network (namely that it can take the mundane and give it great emotional power and tension) while also delivering great moments of levity. This should be the standard going forward for movies like this because not everything is life-or-death important where a laugh here or there would kill the mood and it does reflect reality a little better than when everyone treats everything with the morbid attention paid to the deathbed of a loved one.

The decision of the movie to never show Michael Jordan’s face is an interesting one, though completely understandable. The movie is about Jordan’s decision, however, it is not about what Jordan is doing minute-to-minute. There is a reason that the negotiating power is given to his mother and, while he is in these meetings, he hardly ever speaks. It becomes a distraction for the movie when everyone is concerned about who is playing Jordan and how is his performance as Jordan, almost to a degree where it would harm people’s enjoyment of the film and command the narrative of discussion. Doing it where Jordan is an imposing figure over the proceedings without really seeing him properly or hearing him speak gives him a level of gravitas without being distracting. It also allows for the acting performances across the board to take center stage because these are people who are not entirely in the public eye so the viewer does not have a standard to hold it up to.

Air does a great job of laying out this pivotal story in the history of sports and allowing for it to build up its importance. On top of it being a well-executed story, it does so in a tight under two-hour runtime that never feels like it drags. It is worth seeing in a theater, though that said if one is not in a rush to see it this weekend, it is an Amazon Studios production so it will be on Amazon Prime in reasonably short order.

Final Rating: 9/10

Air comes out on April 7th in theaters.