Film Review - Air (2023)

Air is the new film by Ben Affleck and he also plays Phil Knight the CEO of Nike in 1984 which is losing ground in the sports arena to competitors Converse and Adidas by Sonny (Matt Damon) sees one night a video of a young rookie basketball player named Michael Jordan and decides to bet the fate of his company on signing this young player to their corporate sports line.

Air is terrific fun and is my favourite film of the year so far and firstly that is down to Ben Affleck in the directors chair the first time since Live by Night in 2017 and that film was okay but suffered from a messy script but this time Alex Convery is on scripting duties and he tells this story very well from the corporate side of things and also from the point of view of Jordans parents and Viola Davis as Deloris Jordan is fantastic and I hope she gets nominated for an Oscar for this work.

And Afflecks direction is confident and assured like it was in The Town and Argo and even Live by Night which was very nicely mounted from a visual standpoint and a technical filmmaking one and the performances across the board here are very good, Damon plays a riff on his character in Ford V Ferrari but he did it well there and he does it well here, Jason Bateman is good as Rob Strasser another Nike executive who isn’t keen on singing Jordan singularly, Chris Messina as Jordan’s sport agent is good as well channelling Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire while Matthew Maher is very good as well as Peter Moore the Nike shoe designer.

And lastly as someone who grew up in the 90s and remembers the dominance of Jordan and the Chicago Bulls and Space Jam (which I love and I don’t care who knows it) this movie brought a lot of that back for me much like Netflix’s 2020 documentary series The Last Dance did and throughout the film I thought of the Like Mike ad that Gatorade did in the 90s.

And so that was Air and its my favourite movie of the year so far, I loved this film and its so good to see Ben Affleck back in the directors chair again I can’t wait to see it again, 4 and a half out of 5.