Middle-aged dudes in the mid 1980s pin their career futures and their hopes for the financial future of Nike on a young NBA rookie named Michael Jordan in Air.
I feel like even the movie is somewhat conscious of the fact that it is not the story of a legendary athlete or even, King Richard style, the struggles of that legendary athlete’s parent but the story of some guys who really wanted to capitalize on the status of a hopefully legendary athlete to boost their basketball shoe line. The movie is more stakes-adjacent than stakes-having.
Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) is unimpressed with the meh candidates Nike is looking at to rep their unpopular line of basketball shoes in the coming season. Adidas and Converse are cool and that’s where the big-name players go — the Larry Birds and the Magic Johnsons — including Jordan, whose college career has made him an official One to Watch. Nike marketing guy Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) thinks Sonny should just stick to the brief from company head Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) and use the limited funds given to the basketball division to sponsor three or four lesser lights. But Sonny wants to bet the house on Jordan, even if, as Jordan’s agent David Falk (Chris Messina) tells him, Jordan is almost certain to go with Adidas.
Sonny breaks with the protocol of this type of deal and goes around Falk, traveling to North Carolina to show up at the Jordans’ home. There he meets Michael’s dad, James Jordan (Julius Tennon), and his mom, Deloris Jordan (Viola Davis), who seems to be the true gatekeeper for Michael’s career. She admires Sonny’s persistence just enough to have a brief meeting with him at their house and then later she decides — over her son’s objections — to listen to Nike’s official pitch to Michael Jordan at the company’s Oregon headquarters. (No “Michael Jordan” really appears on screen except as a hazy figure, usually turned away from the camera, who is with his family during business meetings or as the actual guy in historical footage.)
The movie spends not quite enough time with Peter Moore (Matthew Maher), the man who designs the first Air Jordan prototype that the Nike team — which also includes Howard White (Chris Tucker) — hopes to use to convince Michael to pick Nike. His scenes include a fun element of the shoe’s design, which was a purposeful decision to make the shoe more colorful than the NBA technically allowed, with Nike offering to pay the shoe fines, a factor they even planned to work into their marketing. Personally, I found some bits about the artistry of the shoe a fun part of this movie about the making of a hugely culturally significant athletic shoe line. Like, more sneakers in this sneaker movie, would be my preference.
I think we’re maybe supposed to think the heart of this movie is Damon’s ostentatiously schlubby Sonny, with his genuine desire to help Michael Jordan become a legend and his “Gil really needs a sale” energy. And maybe a little bit of our heart is supposed to be with Rob and his sad divorced-dad tale of bribing his daughter with Nikes. I don’t think even the movie believes we’re rooting for Phil Knight, who is giving flaky proto-tech-bro vibes. But come on, with no real Michael Jordan in the picture, the heart of the movie is Davis’ Deloris Jordan, who knows the score when it comes to both her son’s abilities and the way the world is going to want things from him. Casting Davis makes Deloris an easy character to care about — Davis brings weight and substance to the sort of dippy story of, not unlike Tetris, a licensing deal.
Without Davis, I think this movie would feel too lightweight, too lacking in stuff to fill out its nearly two-hour run time. With Davis, the movie feels just substantial enough to justify being in a theater — but just barely. It felt very similar to me to those HBO historical-events movies, particularly to something like The Late Shift, about the Jay Leno-David Letterman Tonight Show story.
If you are moderately interested in this side story from the career of Michael Jordan, Air is moderately interesting. C+
Rated R for language throughout, according to the MPA on filmratings.com, but probably also to signify to grown-up movie goers that this is a grown-up movie where nothing explodes, which is accurate. Directed by Ben Affleck with a screenplay by Alex Convery, Air is one hour and 51 minutes long and distributed by Amazon Studios, which means that it will eventually show up on Prime Video, though it is slated for a longer theatrical release than originally planned, according to Wikipedia.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (PG)
It’s-a him, Mario, in an animated adventure that really just made me feel some nostalgia for OG Nintendo Mario in The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
Not unlike AppleTV+’s Tetris, which somehow seems like the mashup of the two theatrical releases I watched this week, The Super Mario Bros. Movie made me think more about the video game from which it originated — in my case the console and Game Boy versions of the game in 1990something — than anything happening in the movie itself. I was the most casual of video and arcade game players back in the 20th century so it’s interesting how much both games still were part of the wider culture.
Here, we meet brothers Mario (voice of Chris Pratt) and Luigi (more engagingly voiced by Charlie Day), who have just started a plumbing business and sunk all their money into a pretty great TV ad, chock full of “Mama Mia!” type accents from these two otherwise nonspecific American-accented guys. I mention this only because the ad is sort of charmingly goofy in a way most of the rest of this movie isn’t.
After their first job goes wrong because of an angry dog, they try to “save Brooklyn” by fixing some water main problems in the road. Instead, though, they get sucked into a, let’s say, alternate dimension and, while traveling along a rainbow thing I’m just going to call bifrost, are separated. Luigi is flung into a lava world ruled by Bowser (voice of Jack Black), sort of a large battle-turtle intent on capturing all domains and using what Wikipedia tells me is a Super Star to gain invincibility. Mario lands in Mushroom Kingdom, which is sad because he doesn’t like mushrooms, but it’s a generally brighter happier place even if it too is under threat of invasion by Bowser.
Mushroom Kingdom’s Princess Peach (voice of Anya Taylor-Joy) plans to get the support of King Cranky Kong’s (voice of Fred Armisen) army to face Bowser and his army, which leads to Mario fighting the king’s son Donkey Kong (voice of Seth Rogen) and a fun sorta-friendship between the two, which was one of this movie’s better elements. Mario wants to defeat Bowser to get Luigi back — their brotherly relationship is also a nice element but, as they spend most of the movie apart, we don’t get nearly enough of it.
There is a flatness to this movie — it’s colorful and action-packed, but there just isn’t a lot to grab on to in terms of the story or the characters we spend the most time with. Pratt’s Mario is kind of a nothing despite being at the center of this story. He doesn’t have the personality of, say, Pratt’s Emmet in the Lego movies. His adventure partners Donkey Kong and Luigi bring a little something to their roles— the notes of sweetness and weirdness I think you need to make this kind of thing work — but not enough to give the whole movie life. Princess Peach is also kind of an empty character. I realize this is a cartoon based on a video game, but I feel like the movie just hangs it all on the admittedly eye-catching, gameplay-riffing-on visuals without giving the movie even the, uhm, depth of, like, the Trolls movies or that odd noir Pikachu.
The motivations of Bowser (to marry Princess Peach whether she likes it or not) are a little disturbing and a bunch of adorable creatures are threatened with slaughter but this is otherwise probably a fairly older-elementary-schooler acceptable movie. It’s just not a particularly memorable one. C+
Rated PG for action and mild violence, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and co-directed by Pierre Leduc and Fabien Polack with a screenplay by Matthew Fogel, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is an hour and 32 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.
Featured photo: The Super Mario Bros. Movie.