Review: "Air" Gets No Lift Under Its Flat Shot

Ben Affleck struggles to return to his Argo heyday with another sluggish misfire.

April 10, 2023

In 2006, at the dawn of YouTube, Logan Hodge and Gunnar Stansson released “Unforgivable #1” on their self-titled channel, HodgeStansson. The video chronicled the oral history of a man’s date with a young lady he met while shopping at the local mall.

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In the video, the man recounts how, after acquiring the woman’s number, he ventured with her to “Chicken fil-A… some place in the MALL!”

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Befuddled by the establishment’s high occupancy, he inquired, “Who are all these people out here?”

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The girl replied, “Well… it’s the mall…”

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The following four minutes are a legendary lampooning of stereotypical “thug” culture, where a Black man sends up the various perceptions that define such individuals with such lunacy it created one of the video-sharing website's first phenomena.

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The duo released three more videos where the character relays three additional scenarios with similar comedic intent. As of April 2023, the four videos have amassed over 60 million views.

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Unfortunately, the pair’s later offerings failed. While viewers could debate the quality, results matter: no other video uploaded to the channel reached 1 million views. Why?

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Unforgivable boxed them in; viewers expected a specific brand of humor from a familiar character. Without the “Unforgivable Guy,” the channel floundered.

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In short: if we want something, we better get it.

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As such, removing the most prominent athletic star of the 20th century (unless one wishes to argue for Babe Ruth) from his story is imprudent. Alas, that is what Air does, rendering itself a disappointing, lifeless movie.

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In the summer of 1984, the Chicago Bulls drafted Michael Jordan with the third pick in the NBA draft. Jordan was a star at the University of North Carolina (UNC), clinching the national title with a game-winning shot his freshman year. It is this moment that talent scout Sonny Vaccaro cites as he pitches his grand idea to the higher-ups at Nike, a global apparel superpower now but a fledgling enterprise 40 years ago.

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While Vaccaro sits in his chair, reviewing the footage of Jordan’s title-winning shot against Georgetown, it clicks. He replays the footage continuously. Each time, the camera zooms in closer and closer as Vaccaro's eyes slowly widen, but what he’s seeing is a mystery. Is it the miraculous amount of air between the soles of Jordan’s shoes and the court?

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No, that would be too on the nose. Instead, it’s his demeanor. James Worthy was UNC’s star, but the play was not his, and he knew it. It's Jordan's, who knew it too, and he approaches this then-career-defining shot with all the confidence of a seasoned NBA champion. Vaccaro quickly spreads the news: Michael Jordan is the second coming of Christ.

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It’s Air’s most blatant attempt at creating stakes in a movie inherently incapable of providing them. We spend no time journeying with Vaccaro as he sits before the TV. We do not wonder what he sees or what that observation will inspire. We do not care what will happen once he leaves the room and devotes himself to materializing whatever vision appeared to him as Jordan won UNC the title. We do not care because Air makes a costly error, even worse than this one:

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Or this one:

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Or this one:

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It assumes a compelling story can get made about making a shoe.

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Even worse, it believes this despite removing the most vaunted sports figure of the 20th century from the narrative. Air is so opaque in its desire to sideline Jordan and even more so in making us painfully aware of this, thanks to numerous lingering shots of the back of his head.

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Why should we care about the future of sports marketing? Do even young, aspiring athletes slip on signature shoes with such keen awareness that highlights of their favorite player run through their heads from the second the laces get tied to the millisecond they kick the shoes off after a hard day of poor shooting and nonexistent fundamentals?

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It’s a shoe. No one cares.

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Of course, not all films tell stories of things we “care” about; even the most gripping dramas can have stories lacking in meaty content. Unfortunately, what separates those movies from Air is self-awareness: you must know what you are to be more than what you appear. If it is the story of a shoe, convince us that story has something we need. To paraphrase a fictional musician, if this is the way of your movie, forget all the ways it won’t get us off on paper, and you make it get us off.

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Alas, Air believes that the story of a shoe is enough, so it offers little surrounding that idea to make it feel weightier than just being the story of a shoe. It has no humor, unless you count the desperate attempts at having Chris Messina cut down Matt Damon with the false bravado of a mediocre athlete who peaked in high school.

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It has no stakes because if a bunch of ad executives go unemployed for a few months because the significantly more interesting budding basketball star chooses to have his shoe made elsewhere, who cares? It has no urgency because there are no pronounced deadlines or impossible hurdles to overcome aside from a college kid’s obsession with Adidas.

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It has no payoffs because we see shoes a thousand times a day, so unveiling one as though we’ve found the lost city of Atlantis won't resonate. It has no heart because the most potent heart, as Rudy Tomjanovich would tell us, is that of a champion, and the one champion on screen is the one Air refuses to show.

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The drama is so lacking that the film’s climactic moment is Vaccaro, having finally earned the coveted meeting with Jordan, who previously refused to consider Nike, semi-dramatically stopping the showing of a lackluster marketing video to regale Jordan with an endless parade of compliments about his inevitable legend and the immortality that awaits him, all to convince him that the shoe he wears will be a critical part of that legacy.

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Here, one could argue that Air has the necessary self-awareness to become a great movie because Vaccaro essentially repeats the same sentiments until the point has gotten expressed in so many subtly different ways that no viewer could not escape the melodrama.

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It’s the film’s last-ditch effort to resolve forgoing everything that makes a compelling film. Even the aesthetics, filled with plain, claustrophobic office buildings whose plainness never contrasts any on-screen electricity and claustrophobia doesn’t add tension to the goings-on, are so barren that it makes the movie drag even more. All Air can do is play the game like an NBA superstar with the Finals on his shoulders against a better team with everything on their side. It shoots, misses constantly, then banks on a late-game solo avalanche to overcome the deficit.

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Sadly, Air is 30 points down with five minutes remaining and doesn’t realize it. Even if Vaccaro’s speech was finely-penned and well-delivered, neither of which it is, it would fail to make the necessary impact. Air has long since failed itself and its audience. It had no game plan, a thin roster, an unbalanced coaching staff, an outdated playbook, and an aging superstar with little left in the tank. Regardless of the favorable officiating crew (to the tune of an inexplicable 97% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a broadcasting team that, while perhaps not favoring the home narrative as much as a marquee flick would desire, certainly did their share to convince us this movie was worth our time.

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It’s not and, as a result, becomes ironic. The movie, ostensibly, is about the creation of Air Jordan, yet can’t lift itself off the ground, not even a few inches, and certainly not high enough to throw down one of the basketball legend’s signature slam dunks. For a movie called Air, it needs a pump.