Air review: Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s tale of how Michael Jordan’s mum made Nike the world’s biggest sports brand is a splendid origins story, says BRIAN VINER
Air (15, 112 mins)
Verdict: Shoe and tell
Rating: 
The Super Mario Bros Movie (PG, 92 mins)
Verdict: Perfunctory
Rating:
Ben Affleck’s film Air tells the story of how the mighty basketball player Michael Jordan, then only on the cusp of greatness, came to sign a merchandising deal with the sports shoe manufacturer Nike. If you almost nodded off reading that sentence, so did I writing it.
But wait! Because what this film is, really, is a rousing cinematic hymn to corporate America. And it’s annoyingly hard not to hum along.
It is set in 1984, when Nike, to switch metaphors, is puffing along on the shoulder of the German giant Adidas. Barely 21, Jordan is far from the behemoth he will become, but he isn’t exactly unknown, either. He has so excelled in college that he is the third pick in the draft system that allows the worst-performing teams in the National Basketball Association (NBA) to recruit the best up-and-coming players.
Nike’s basketball division, meanwhile, is struggling. Run by Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), it desperately needs a major star to endorse its products, but keeps being out-jumped by Adidas and Converse.
Then Sonny Vaccaro, a charismatic marketing man responsible for scouting new talent (played by a chubbed-up Matt Damon), sees something in video footage of Jordan that nobody else has spotted: an almost preternatural level of confidence and skill.
Vaccaro convinces his sceptical boss, the company’s founder Phil Knight (Affleck), that they should blow their whole budget of $250,000, set aside to sign three players, to ensure they get just one. He alone predicts that Jordan is destined for mega-stardom. A compulsive gambler, he is certain enough to stake his career on it.
But there is a significant hurdle. Jordan doesn’t like Nike basketball shoes and won’t even listen to their overtures.
So Vaccaro crosses the country from the company’s offices in Oregon to the family home in North Carolina to see if he can sweet-talk them into playing ball.
It’s an audacious move and Jordan’s agent (Chris Messina) is furious when he finds out, but the Jordans duly turn up to hear the offer and see the shoe newly designed by Nike’s creative genius Peter Moore (played by Matthew Maher more or less as James Bond’s Q).
Pictured: Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro and Viola Davis as Deloris Jordan in AIR
It is mostly red, the colours of the team that has recruited Jordan (the Chicago Bulls). This contravenes the NBA’s rule that all shoes must be more than half-white. There will be a $5,000-per-game fine but Nike are, yes, bullish enough to pay it. And they will call this handsome item of footwear the Air Jordan.
While all this is going on, Affleck’s camera coyly tiptoes around Michael himself, showing him only fleetingly from behind. But that doesn’t matter because the key character is his shrewd, steely mother Deloris (Viola Davis), who is immune to Vaccaro’s boardroom sales patter (‘He doesn’t wear the shoe, he is the shoe’).
Like Vaccaro, she already knows what her son’s value will be to Nike, and there’s a good scene when she throws in a condition that makes the executives gulp (and ensures that her boy will become richer than Croesus).
As I say, it’s a good scene. Indeed, it’s a good film. When they’re as slick as this (see also David Fincher’s The Social Network and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs), movies about seismic business ventures (and this film is much more about business than sport) always are.
Affleck directs with a sure hand, the acting is as uniformly excellent as you’d expect, and Alex Convery’s script keeps the narrative flowing with just the right injection of wit.
Ben Affleck as Phil Knight in AIR. The film tells the story of how the mighty basketball player Michael Jordan, then only on the cusp of greatness
I’ve managed so far to resist the screechingly obvious basketball analogy but I can’t hold it back any longer; you’d think that, with all its virtues, Air would be a slam-dunk for four stars.
Certainly, it’s as splendid a shoe origin story as you’re ever likely to see. But it falls just short, not so much because it solemnly enshrines that U.S.-centric belief that Michael Jordan is the greatest athlete who ever drew breath and that his deal with Nike changed the entire world, but more because, simply by being such a paean to corporate America, it basically romanticises greed.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie, by contrast, romanticises a pair of short, squat Italian-American plumbers from Brooklyn. It’s a Universal Pictures production in collaboration with Nintendo, the Japanese video game giant that took a long while to recover from the 1993 live-action version of its famous creation Super Mario. That film was a notorious dud, described by Bob Hoskins as the worst thing he ever did: a ‘f****** nightmare’ made by ‘f****** idiots’.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie romanticises a pair of short, squat Italian-American plumbers from Brooklyn
Now 30 years seems like enough time for sorrowful contemplation before trying again, so here we are with a colourful animation voiced by big-hitters including Chris Pratt (as Mario), Jack Black and Anya Taylor-Joy.
It’s very silly, with a most perfunctory plot involving a fantasy ride straight from the New York sewers to the magical Mushroom Kingdom ruled by the comely Princess Peach (Taylor-Joy), who is lusted after by a villainous dragon called Bowser (Black).
With the enjoyable Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves still in cinemas, and word spreading about the terrific Tetris on Apple TV+, films inspired by games are bang in vogue.
This one is different in that it’s aimed squarely at children, and different again in that it feels rather desperately derivative (there is even a shameless nod to Disney’s 1967 classic The Jungle Book).
But — and it’s a pint-sized ‘but’ — I watched it in a cinema full of kids, and most of them laughed all the way through.
Even Pontius Pilate would love this Easter ‘we-welease’…
Just in time for Easter, Monty Python’s Life Of Brian (12A, 94 mins) is back in cinemas today, 44 years after the blasphemy furore that saw it banned in Hereford and Harrogate, among many other places — not to mention the entire county of Cornwall (which helped it to do fantastic business in Exeter, over the Devon border).
Times have changed, of course. From an entirely personal perspective, I have forgiven the film for the teasing I got at school in 1979. Indeed, I’m going to request a rendition of Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life at my funeral.
As for everyone else, I can’t imagine anyone being other than delighted when Life Of Brian was last shown in cinemas just four years ago, and advertised on posters as a 40th anniversary ‘we-welease’. That was in honour of Michael Palin’s Pontius Pilate, who couldn’t roll his Rs, but there is so much else to cherish in Python’s timelessly brilliant satire (not of Christ, but of the zealotry of his followers) that it really is worth trying to catch on the big screen.
Speaking of anniversaries, the great George Harrison would have turned 80 just a few weeks ago. I love the fact that he financed Life Of Brian when everybody else ran scared — not least because he felt that the Pythons, who formed just as The Beatles were splitting up, had absorbed their irreverent spirit. Now that would have been a mouthful for Palin’s Pilate.
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