aerial examination

If you can manage it, Air it could be the first in a wave of shoe movies. Can we expect a feature explaining how the Hush Puppies got their name? A Cole Haan origin story, starring Cole Hauser? “Crocs: The Movie”? It’s easy to joke, but Ben Affleck’s Nike thriller does a pretty tough job: get you interested in how a pair of basketball shoes came to be. Even if it does not reach the heights of Affleck’s best directorial work (Argon, The city), is still gripping, deftly finding the human dramas pulsating through what is, on the face of it, a rather specific theme.

The actor slate encourages the proposal, especially his Affleck/Matt Damon meeting, the second in recent years, after the one in 2021. the last duel. In this film, Damon knelt before his old friend; in this, their relationship is more contentious, and all the better. Affleck threw himself into a feisty supporting role, as billionaire Nike co-founder Phil Knight amusingly plays him as an aphorism-spewing Buddhist who frets about his cherry-colored sports car.

Knight’s love of racing is not shared by Damon’s frame, Sonny Vaccaro, the film’s protagonist, a pale-faced sniper doing his best to think while watching two televisions at once. Surrounding him are a succession of crackerjacks: Jason Bateman as a skeptical executive, Chris Tucker (in his first film role in seven years) as a fast-talking marketer, and above all Viola Davis as Michael Jordan’s mother, Deloris, who Vaccaro has to court. if he wants to fulfill his hoop dream and get the deal of his life.

It’s a crowd-pleaser, fueled by hilarious dialogue, set in motion by its players. But Air He has a little problem with Michael Jordan. Presumably in deference to the basketball legend, Affleck introduces him as a mysteriously invisible figure in the drama: Jordan (Damian Delano Young) has only one say, and when he’s present, the film revolves around him (it’s unintentionally funny when, in a pivotal scene in the boardroom, quickly turn your head to study something on a wall before you can see it properly).

The byproduct of that is that Jordan becomes a strangely inconsequential presence in a film about him; a man who lets his mother speak for itself and seems to have little agency. Deloris, on the other hand, comes across as a tour de force and empathy, the Jordan River of the film you’ll think of. Though the role is one-note, Davis is superb: in basketball parlance, his performance is graceful.

The film as a whole isn’t that elegant, sometimes feeling generic (the “Look! It’s the 80s!” montage that opens Air could be from a hundred other movies) and sometimes slip into generic sports movies. It’s a lot of fun, much more of a movie about a big company trying to make even more money. But I could have paid a little more attention to number 3 on Nike’s famous list of ten business principles: “Break the rules.”