Air

Director: Ben Affleck (USA). Year of Release: 2023

Air opens with a barrage of cultural signifiers to remind us that we are in 1984. Mark Knopfler’s guitar blasts while Sting warbles that he wants his MTV. In rapid succession we see clips from The A Team, Knight Rider, and Ghostbusters, plus shows that may well mean something to a US audience of a certain age but left me cold. We see people twisting Rubik’s cubes and video games and eventually there is even a reference to George Orwell. Look, we get it. We know what year it is.

Then, just as Matt Damon’s character Sonny appears, we hear the opening chords to a quite different song – Violent Femmes’ Blister in the Sun. Air uses its soundtrack very literally. Is it really introducing its main character with a song about wanking? I think that this song – in a soundtrack dominated by bland MOR – is meant to prove Sonny’s edginess. But it is played so quietly that it makes you think less of danger than of turning the stereo down in case it annoys the neighbours.

For many years, I have talked about films which spend all their costume and soundtrack money on reminding us over and over again of the year in which they are set. Time and again I’ve said that it is all quite embarrassing, but at least it is not as self-indulgently bad as the Wedding Singer. I thought that I would go to my grave knowing that no film could try so hard to shout it’s period setting at the audience than the Wedding Singer. I think that the bar has just been lowered.

Sonny is a sports agent, a basketball expert whose job is to find stars prepared to sponsor Nike shoes. He has his eye on a new talent – Michael Jordan, ranked third among new college players. Sonny watches a video of Jordan and sees how his fellow players trusted him. He is convinced that he has seen a nacent superstar. Instead of hedging their bets and sponsoring 3 players, Nike should spend their whole $250 million budget on shoes for Jordan. They could call them Air Jordans.

One of the big problems of Air (there is more than one problem) is the absolute absence of dramatic tension. Sonny’s boss, Nike CEO Phil Knight, is hostile to his idea until the very last minute, as are the marketing guys in the office. Jordan had publicly expressed his preference for Adidas and refuses to even talk to Nike. Will Sonny convince everyone to change their mind? Will Air Jordan ever become a Thing? Hindsight gives us a clue in answering these stupid questions.

I have seen more indulgent critics compare Air with Titanic – knowing that the boat would sink did not cause us to dislike Titanic, did it? Leaving aside the dubious claim that Titanic was a likeable film, this is not a fair comparison. The point of Titanic was not to make us worry whether the ship would by-pass the iceberg. It was, for better or worse, about the social interactions between its characters. The point of Air is entirely about whether Nike would be able to sign Jordan.

This inanity is not helped by some scenes which make you wonder whether the film used any quality control at all. At one stage a trendy marketing guy actually says: “You know that new song by Bruce Springsteen – Born in the USA? You know how it sounds like a great patriotic song? Well, I listened to it and it’s about a Vietnam vet losing his home”. The character is dumb enough to have this sort of epiphany, but dialogue like this just treats the audience with contempt.

This is far from the worst scene in the film. Towards the end, Sonny makes a (check script) moving appeal to Jordan to sign to Nike. The speech is overblown and melodramatic, and everything you’d expect from a second rate film. What it most definitely not is great. But, once Jordan has left the room, every single other person – and there are about 5 of them – goes up to Sonny and tells him how great he spoke. I think the audience will be the judge of this, thank you very much.

I haven’t even mentioned how Jordan is excluded from his own film. Director Ben Affleck made the decision to only film the Jordan character from behind or in old footage of basketball games. I can see an artistic reason for this – just as many Biblical Epics did not show Jesus, Jordan is arguably too big for this sort of film. But in practise, it just looks dumb, most notably in the boardroom scene where Jordan enters and suddenly gets intensely interested in something in the far corner.

For a sports film, there are a lot of boardroom scenes. This is because it is intense awe of some of the world’s most evil people. Knight is portrayed as an amiable Buddhist with bad dress sense. Every so often we see one of the 10 Principles of Nike, pieces of inane bullshit marketing speak (“our business is change”, anyone?) meant to make us think that people like Knight do any more than exploit South East Asian children to make footwear that they sell at enormous profits.

Air cannot conceive of a greater success than Jordan managing to get Nike to pay him percentage points on all shoes sold with his name on them. This portrays not just the millionaire sports star as an underdog, but also the overpaid executives who negotiated the deal. And while you probably won’t be surprized that the film fails to mention Nike’s notorious use of sweatshop labour, there is a presumptuous shamelessness in using the end credits to say that Knight gave $2 billion to charity.

I would normally warn any sentient being to avoid this sort of bullshit like the plague, and yet this is a film packed with top level actors, in particular Viola Davis as Jordan’s mum. None of the actors disgrace themself, although they can only go so far with the script that they’ve been given. And this script is particularly terrible. It is film about one of the world’s leading Black sportsman which avoids sport almost entirely so it can concentrates on the comfortable white money men.

What could possibly go wrong?