Review: Air breezes through for entertaining sports comedy

Who’d have thought that a film about a basketball shoe could be quite so entertaining? Air takes us back to 1984 – and boy, doesn’t it make it look a long time ago with those haircuts, clothes and stonking great desk-top computers. Back to the year when Nike were struggling with their basketball roster, falling behind other brands and potentially losing their place in the sport altogether.

Enter Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro, the overweight heavy-gambling talent scout, a man hot on instinct – as indeed, presumably, all talent scouts ought to be. And he senses something in the then totally unknown Michael Jordan, a man who we now know as the greatest basketball player ever to play the game. Sonny senses his calmness, his enjoyment, his positioning and his reading of the game – and senses that here is “one of those extraordinary people that only come along once in a while.”

The odd thing is that absolutely everyone else is persuaded of this. Jordan is the total rookie, and yet bizarrely everyone seems to take his total eventual greatness as read – from which point it all becomes about which shoe company is going to sign him. Adidas are in the running; so are Converse; and so are Nike, their basketball operations on the slide, and yet Sonny has got the charisma to persuade them to bid for him, which means putting all their eggs in one basket. Usually they come up with the cash for three players to back; if they want Jordan, they’ve got to blow it all on him. Which, of course, they do, and in the process, they completely rewrite sports sponsorship, packaging and marketing. Which really, really oughtn’t to be terribly interesting. And yet it is, not necessarily because of the story itself but because of the cracking characters that are paraded before us. Sonny is brilliantly evoked by Damon, all insight, the hustler, the guy who won’t take no for an answer, the innovator, the guy most prepared to abide by Nike’s cherished principles, most notably that one about life being all about the rules that we break.

Great fun too is Ben Affleck, who also directs, as Nike founder Phil, a strange guy, clumsy in negotiations, cautious, prone to meditation – and yet someone who has created this massive corporation. Great too from Viola Davis, Michael Jordan’s super-savvy mum who seems completely at ease with the huge businesses bidding for her 18-year-old son, a youngster who, essentially, has done nothing much more at this stage than show potential. Great fun too from Chris Messina’s agent David Falk, a bully in business, content to have all clients and no friends – and yet a guy with bags of charm behind the banter. Put them all together and there is plenty of wit, some great one-liners – and a film which certainly entertains. It even manages to make work its odd decision never to show us the young Jordan other than from behind and never to let him speak.

By the end of it we have seen Nike revolutionise the world of sports and contemporary culture with its Air Jordan brand – and Michael’s mum has rewritten the rule books to ensure that sportsmen can expect a slice of the revenue too when a product carries their name. It’s an easy and entertaining watch. And what a cracking soundtrack.

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