With Air, Ben Affleck’s latest directorial effort, he accomplishes the near-impossible: he makes a pending business deal as compelling as a hostage crisis (Argo) or a bank heist (The Town). It’s safe to say that this Affleck kid knows how to please a crowd (and not just in memes).
His latest is the true story of how a few rumpled executives at Nike gambled everything on a rookie named Michael Jordan by creating a sneaker around his persona (the Air Jordan) and by doing so, changed the way businesses worked with athletes forever. But that’s just the skeleton. At its core, this is a classic underdog tale about the American dream, believing in your instincts, and the risk it takes to jump off a cliff to see where you land.
It’s 1984, and the movie opens with a montage of capitalist-driven, pop culture references from that era like Ghostbusters, Run-DMC, and the famous “Where’s the beef?” Wendy’s commercial. It’s a loud, fluorescent smack in the face, which quickly turns drab when we meet our protagonists at the Oregon-based Nike corporation. Yes, there’s a machine behind all this glitz, and it’s not as colorful as the products.. Enter Sonny Vaccaro (a paunchy Matt Damon), Nike’s talent scout, who’s being pressured by headquarters to pull their basketball division out of its dismal 19% share of the market which is being dominated by Adidas and Converse. Vaccaro knows the only way to make Nike “cool” again is to discover a new player that can endorse their product.
One night, after stumbling upon a commercial where Arthur Ashe shows off his new customized racket, an invigorated Vaccaro urges his cohorts to sink their entire budget into one player and not spread it around to two or three others. Furthermore, they need to create an entire shoe-line around this mysterious wunderkind. The player he has in mind is a rookie named Michael Jordan. So, how did Vaccaro choose the kid with the intense stare from Wilmington, North Carolina? He…
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