Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Air’ on Prime Video, Ben Affleck’s Amusing and Nostalgic Behind-the-Brand Sports Saga

Make no mistake, Air (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) wants us to shed a tear and pump our fist for A BRAND. Sure, human beings are involved, but the human beings in this BOATS (Based On A True Story, yo) movie created a logo and some catchphrases that pretty much everyone of a certain vintage knows, because they were, and still are, so damn pervasive in American culture. The movie is Ben Affleck’s first directorial effort since Live by Night, a movie we forgot existed, but we didn’t forget Argo, because it won him a damn Oscar, a damn good reminder that he’s damn talented behind the camera. Affleck also co-stars with his producing partner Matt Damon, to tell the story of how an athletic-shoe corporation talked a basketball player into an endorsement deal – a basketball player who’s now considered the greatest athlete of all time in any sport. His name is You Know Who. We never see You Know Who’s face in this movie, which has some people perplexed – maybe even some of them who made the film an $85 million at the box office – but keep in mind, the makers of movies do such things for a reason, which we’ll suss out here today. 

AIR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 1984, and this movie will remind you of that fact with its persistent soundtrack of the hits of the era. Cyndi Lauper, Night Ranger, Bruce Springsteen, Mike and the Mechanics, Run DMC – all covered, and then some. It opens with Dire Straits’ ‘Money for Nothing,’ which may be thematically appropriate, or might just sound cool and get us revved up, and doesn’t warrant any more thought than that. We see a montage of all kinds of Very Incredibly 1984 Things: Reagan, Where’s the Beef, breakdancing, Cabbage Patch Kids, VHS, Ghostbusters, Jane Fonda workout tapes… it goes on, and on, and on. Just a deluge. ‘Money for Nothing’ never felt so long. Anyway. We meet Sonny Vaccaro (Damon) in the bleachers of a high school basketball game. He works for Nike as a talent scout, hunting for badass basketballers for endorsement deals. It’s important to note that his flights back to Nike HQ in Oregon often include layovers in Vegas, where it’s established that the guy’s a gambler. He wins some and loses some. This movie is about him winning one. A big one.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – there’s a lot of drama and witty dialogue to get through before Sonny lands his big fish. In the business of Big Basketball Shoe, Nike is in third place behind Table Time and Allied Biscuit. Er, I mean, Converse, who dominates the market, and Adidas. We meet the character Chris Tucker plays, and I’m not sure what his purpose here is besides us getting a chuckle out of Chris Tucker sharing scenes in a movie with Damon and Affleck. Nike CEO Phil Knight (Affleck) banter-argues with Sonny about the basketball endorsement budget, which is miniscule. Nike is foremost a “jogging company,” and Phil has to answer to the board and then hop in his metallic-purple Porsche and drive home to take off his socks and shoes and do many hours of yoga or whatever. Very rich and very earthy, this guy.

Jason Bateman is in this movie, too – have I mentioned that? He’s Rob Strasser, a marketing honcho. He powwows with Sonny and the other scouts, hoping to target potential NBA draft picks. Some of them are funny, Guys who weren’t shit, and other Guys who are Hakeem Olajuwon and John Stockton and a kid from North Carolina who the Bulls picked at no. 3. The competition will hoover up the good ones, no doubt, fueled by bigger budgets and prestige. Maybe they should go after Charles Barkley? Nah, “no one wants to see Barkley on TV” is the sentiment, proof that whoever wrote this script (guilty: Alex Convery) likes to write funny lines from here in the future.

And then Sonny goes home to his sad TV dinner and sits in the dark watching game tape over and over again. Was he ever married? Kids? Probably not. He’s married to SPORTS. Or SHOES. Or maybe SPORTS SHOES is more accurate? Whatever. The game tape: It’s Jordan, draining the game-winner in the NCAA national championship. Swish. Rewind. Swish. Rewind. Swish. And Sonny has a feeling about this guy. He does his damnedest to convince Rob and Phil that Nike has to take everything it has and give it to Jordan. In fact, they’ll make a shoe specifically for him. Real “he doesn’t wear the shoe, he IS the shoe” drivel that’s easy to say from 39 years later when we know what happens. So Sonny makes phone calls to Jordan’s agent (Chris Messina) and drops in at his parents’ house in North Carolina for an intense convo with his mother Deloris (Viola Davis!) and goes down to the basement of Nike offices to consult the weirdo Matthew Maher (Peter Moore) about designing the – wait for it – no, keep waiting – one more em dash – AIR JORDAN. Will they woo Jordan away from Adidas? You know the answer to that. You also know it’s gonna take a goddamn SPEECH first, though.  

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Between Air and Adam Sandler basketball-guy movie Hustle, basketball scouts live unglamorous lives that involve big professional risks with high reward. Air also brought to mind Jerry Maguire and Space Jam, for obvious reasons.

Performance Worth Watching: Of course Viola Davis comes in and substances-up the place in only a handful of scenes, playing a mother who knows what’s right. She plays the coolest head in the room, probably because she’s the coolest head in any room, fictional or non – such is her presence, as an actor of significance in a room full of talented movie stars.

Memorable Dialogue: Variations on a theme:

“A shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it.” – Sonny

“A shoe is just a shoe until my son steps into it.” – Deloris

Sex and Skin: None. 

Our Take: Yeah, the hell with Air for making us feel dramatically invested in the origin of a grossly capitalist endeavor that, per the movie’s postscript, earns the athlete in question $400 million annually in “passive income” – if you don’t know what that is, look it up and feel free to be infuriated – and turned an already large corporation into a massive world-eater. And to hell with it for being so damn entertaining, fueled by its inspired cast, consistently witty dialogue and that thing that has no value whatsoever but is so intoxicating to pretty much all of us, what’s it called again? Right: Nostalgia. F— nostalgia. That pop-cultural siren song that’s sold to us wholesale like the pallet-sized crate of Doritos at Costco. F— it especially when it earworms us with REO Speedwagon. It’s just cruel and soulless and cruel, and it doesn’t fight fair.

So enjoy the gross cognitive dissonance that comes with this movie, which kind of sits in awe and praise of capitalism, and maybe could only be made by people who are already rich, or want to get rich by making a movie (it’s Convery’s only IMDb credit so far, and hopefully not his last). It’s kind of clueless in that way, like a lolling-tongue lap dog eager to please and oblivious to criticism whether it’s coming or going. But it’s also a wiseass, all too aware of its jokes-in-retrospect, all the irony it ratatats at us knowing we’ll feel smarter than the characters who naysay Nike’s endeavor; we’re also skeptical of Sonny’s prognostication powers, because he sometimes speaks as if he’s trying not to let on that he’s a time traveler from four decades later. The character is more than a bit artificial in that way, although the movie goes out of its way to show him crossing the double-yellow line to pass other cars because, you know, he’s a risk-taker! And this deal is a gamble on top of a gamble on top of a gamble! And what’s more engrossing than watching a guy stick his neck waaayyyy out there, even though we know his head stays attached? I don’t have a good answer for that, but I think it’s mostly because the film is spirited, energetic and effortlessly funny.

Affleck-the-director handles the moving parts of this story like the pro he is. He also has come into his own as an actor in recent years, showing previously uncharted depth of character in supporting roles like this one, The Tender Bar and The Last Duel, and as the lead in The Way Back. He’s mostly frosting in Air though, with Damon showing his usual crackling populist appeal in nearly every shot of the movie, Bateman being pragmatic and funny in a middleman role, Davis owning her every scene and a fraction of the back of Damian Delano Young’s head playing said basketball player (who’s otherwise only seen in archival footage). Why the hell does a movie about Whatsisname not factor Whatsisname into the story? We can speculate: We already know his side of the story. He’s not the story, he’s just the catalyst for it. And it keeps the film focused – focused on printing the legend, because when all is said and done, and he’s dust and we’re dust and our children’s children are dust, more people will recognize the logo than the face. We’re mortal; the brand is not.

Our Call: Air is about money. Money, and all the dumb shit that has to do with having it and acquiring it and using it to get more of it. What does it say about us that we’re so entertained by stories about it? Don’t think about it – and I know this is a riff on a corporate slogan, but the cheap-ass joy of riffing off it is undeniable: Just STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.