“Air” is an Inspirational Story of a True Underdog: A Multimillion Dollar Corporation

Ben Affleck’s two hour Nike commercial is a perfect sports movie, exhibiting incredible feats of endorsement and product marketing

Aaron Sorkin-esque procedurals about product licensing are shaping up to be the biggest biopic trend of 2023, with Tetris, Blackberry, and most notably, Air all striking it big at the box office. The films diverge from the traditional formula, focusing less on characters and more on the journey to success of beloved commodities. Air is the exemplar of this trend — a cohesive film that is caught in pastiche, one that prioritizes praise of consumerism rather than development of a compelling story.

Air follows Nike’s emerging basketball division as it struggles to make a name for itself while lacking the budget to buy the endorsement of up-and-coming big NBA names. Basketball talent scout Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) hopes to strike a business deal with then-unknown Michael Jordan, but Nike’s sparse resources prove a challenge to sign the Adidas-allegiant rookie. Vaccaro campaigns for Nike’s entire marketing partnership budget to go to Jordan, much to the chagrin of Marketing VP Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) and CEO Phil Knight (Ben Affleck). However, by connecting and brokering the deal directly with Jordan’s parents, Vaccaro constructs what will become the most lucrative sneaker line in history, securing for every party involved hundreds of millions in income for the coming decades. 

Director and star Ben Affleck takes the most enticing tropes from any classic sports movie and recontextualizes them into the mundane setting of business meetings and office parks, using non-stop 1980s needle drops to pump adrenaline and excitement into scenes of brokering deals and signing contracts. Alex Convery’s screenplay is not witty or interesting enough to compensate for Air’s total lack of stakes — no one is sitting on the edge of their seat, biting their nails and wondering if the Nike corporation is going to fail. The gross majority of the movie’s humor is built around trite period piece formulas: characters espouse about their current reality that modern audiences now know to be absurd, or characters espouse about an absurd future that modern audiences now know to be true (Charles Barkley on TV? Now that would be crazy!). 

The final act of the film is focused on the Jordan family’s desire for Michael to receive a percentage of the profit of every pair of Air Jordans sold, a demand that Nike is vehemently opposed to. To secure the endorsement, Michael’s mother Deloris (Viola Davis) convinces Nike to include the bonus. The film frames the inclusion of this bonus, and the subsequent success of Air Jordan, as a victory for workers — finally, a big corporation gives proper compensation to the person whose image and labor provide the company with profit — but the obvious agenda of the movie is to reframe Nike’s relationship with labor issues from a public relations perspective, rather than to address workers’ rights.

For decades, Nike has been under fire for various violations of labor laws or misconduct, and Air is a blatant attempt at reorienting the corporation’s image. In the 1990s, American labor activists and journalistic exposes revealed the extent of Nike’s child labor, poverty wages, and hazardous working conditions, and the company has since treated the issue as a public relations inconvenience and nothing more. In 2019, former middle-distance runner Mary Cain came forward about the years of emotional and physical abuse that she had endured from the age of 16 during her time as a athlete of Nike’s Oregon Project. Additionally, recent examinations of chairman Phil Knight’s extensive charity work have revealed that he is using philanthropy as a means of mitigating tax on his income, even though Air’s epilogue paints an image of Knight as a selfless philanthropist. 

Ultimately, Air is a public relations ploy by a billion-dollar corporation to re-focus their image as a company that truly understands the value and promise of labor, and by extension, its workers. The most striking irony in Nike’s story about their own generosity in allowing a man to not be exploited for his image is that Air doesn’t even give Michael Jordan a face. The issue was cited as a storytelling complication by director Affleck, who said, “There is no way I was ever going to ask an audience to believe that anybody other than Michael Jordan was Michael Jordan.” Jordan remains a faceless, voiceless shadow in the background, represented solely by his parents and business partners. One of the most influential figures of all time is reduced to a canvas onto which is painted a two-hour advertisement. 

OVERALL RATING: 5/10

Air was released on April 5 and is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.