When Air was first announced, and the hype around Ben Affleck directing his longtime friend Matt Damon died down, everyone thought it was going to be a film on Nike’s origin and legacy. Then began chatter of a Phil Knight biopic. Wait, could it be a Michael Jordan basketball memoir?
But Air is not about a company, person or sport; it’s about a shoe — a single custom-made sneaker in fact — that would change the history of footwear and sports marketing forever.
Affleck’s fifth feature is radically different in genre from his earlier outings as filmmaker ( The Town, Argo, Gone Baby Gone), but you get the same sense of deft touch and assuredness just a few minutes into the narrative — a cast populated with the fraternity’s finest certainly helps — which takes an old-fashioned, well-worn path towards its climax.
