7/13/2023 0 Comments Quite soulless gameLikewise, Jordan's mom Deloris is the one who holds the key to Sonny's future at Nike, and when she shrewdly negotiates with him over the phone – she insists her son get a cut of the revenue, unheard of at that time – Air wants the audience to believe there's a deeper purpose here beyond an exercise in championing capitalism. Rob's monologue is obviously thrown in to lend some weight to the Jordan recruitment that doesn't exist within the depiction of Sonny himself. Her love, it seems, is conditional upon being able to sport the latest kicks.) In those few minutes, we learn more about this secondary character than our disrupter, whose only defining characteristics are that he likes to gamble and that he's out of shape (several characters comment upon his weight). (He only gets to see her once a week following his divorce and always brings her a new pair of complimentary Nikes. This becomes painfully clear somewhere around the midway point of Air when Rob delivers a monologue about how he's wary of Sonny's wild plans and that he really, really needs to keep his job, not just for a paycheck, but because working at Nike has allowed him to connect with his young daughter. (Many of the major figures involved, including Vaccaro and Knight, are still with us.) Sonny, our erstwhile hero, is by far the least interesting character a bland descendant of countless white guy protagonists who have nothing left to lose, including Tom Cruise's Jerry Maguire. And to be fair, the performers are fully committed to what little character development they're given – Davis is, per usual, giving off convincing gravitas Messina's prickly and lends some levity to the proceedings.īut just as there are many meetings that could've been an email, this is one movie that could've been a narrative podcast. Exactly how will Sonny finally break through all that defense and drive this deal to the net, huh?Īir is convinced there's enough nail-biting tension to be gleaned from this conundrum and enough audience buy-in of the Jordan mythos and brand to overcome such a flimsy premise. And so Sonny does what all "great" men in Movies About Great Men do – he goes rogue, secretly driving from Oregon to the Jordan family's home in North Carolina to pitch himself directly to Deloris. Unfortunately for Sonny, being a disrupter means facing opposition from those content with the status quo – including his boss, the cantankerous CEO Phil Knight (a red-haired Affleck) the by-the-books VP of marketing Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) and Jordan's misanthropic, hard-bargaining agent David Falk (Chris Messina), who doesn't even want his client to take a meeting with Nike. Instead of spending its budget on signing multiple new basketball stars, Sonny wants Nike to go all-in on Jordan. After replaying a VHS tape of the athlete's game-winning shot at the 1982 NCAA Championships, he decides the company has to break traditions and make an offer the other brands won't. ![]() Sonny is positioned as a "disrupter" who sees "greatness" in Jordan at a time when few others do. (Interestingly, the faceless actor playing Jordan is only seen from behind and mutters just a handful of words throughout the entire film.) It's set up as an affirmation of Black Excellence writ large, of a budding superstar demanding, via his sharp-witted mother Deloris (Viola Davis), he is paid his worth in a business known for exploiting its athletes, especially its Black ones. It's imagined as a classic American tale of ambition and a singular vision, in the form of the underestimated salesman Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon). It's presented as a classic sports movie about an underdog team (in this case, Nike) achieving greatness with a game-winning score (a rousing boardroom sales pitch). OK, that's the crass way of describing it the film's creators would undoubtedly characterize their aims as being more "inspiring" than that. Directed by Ben Affleck with a screenplay by Alex Convery, Air is a soulless dramatization of how a giant corporation convinced a promising NBA rookie to make its already wealthy and well-off board members, CEOs, and salespeople even wealthier and set for life. But we're living in the era of the nostalgic headline-to-Hollywood pipeline and in an age where entrepreneurs are obsessed with being credited as artistic visionaries, so perhaps it was inevitable something like the movie Air would come to exist. ![]() Over the years, there have been plenty of examinations of the Air Jordan brand's fraught success and influence, including a 2018 documentary, Unbanned: The Legend of AJ1. It renewed hand-wringing over American consumerism and " Black-on-Black" crime. The Air Jordan line was a culture-shifting juggernaut, impacting not just the business of sports but fashion, celebrity, hip-hop, and street culture for decades to come. In 1984, a young Michael Jordan signed what was then the NBA's most lucrative sneaker deal with Nike.
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