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Nostalgic crowd-pleaser soars in Jordan’s shoes
Damon Smith reviews the latest new releases to watch in the cinema
AIR (15)
In writer-director Cameron Crowe’s 1996 feelgood comedy Jerry Maguire, Cuba Gooding Jr’s wide receiver Rod Tidwell encourages his beleaguered agent (Tom Cruise) to secure him a better contract deal by chanting: “Show me the money!”
His plea to reward fairly an athlete’s sporting excellence in an industry that aggressively markets and merchandises its biggest names until their star has dimmed reverberates throughout Air.
Set more than a decade before Jerry Maguire, director Ben Affleck’s nostalgic drama recreates the behind-the-scenes negotiations of the ground-breaking 1984 partnership between rookie player Michael Jordan and Nike’s basketball division. The landmark agreement gave birth to the first Air Jordan but also granted an athlete a percentage of profits from every shoe sold for the first time.
“A shoe is just a shoe – until my son steps in it,” Jordan’s formidable mother Deloris (Viola Davis) reminds Nike, coining her elegant alternative to the Tidwell mantra.
Scripted by Alex Convery, Air inhales the stale machismo, sweat and desperation of Nike executives – underdogs at the time with a 17% market share of basketball sneaker sales behind Adidas and Converse – as they seek to change perceptions of their brand and disprove Jordan’s bullish agent David Falk (Chris Messina) when he jibes that worldclass players don’t wear thirdplace shoes. Leading the charge is Nike’s basketball talent scout Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), who believes the company should invest its entire annual 250,000 US dollar budget in one prospect: 21-year-old NBA rookie Michael Jordan.
His high-risk strategy is initially rejected by eccentric CEO Phil Knight (Affleck) and vice president of marketing Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), who believe they should hedge bets on three or four players.
Howard White (Chris Tucker), VP of basketball athlete relations, succinctly sums up the problem facing the company: “Nike is a jogging company. Black people don’t jog.”
Unperturbed, Vaccaro flouts protocols which require companies to negotiate with a player’s agent and he travels to North Carolina to speak directly to Michael’s parents Deloris (Davis) and James (Julius Tennon).
“I am willing to bet my career on Michael Jordan,” explains Vaccaro when he returns to Nike headquarters in Portland to justify his actions. To win big, he requires a spark of genius from creative director Peter Moore (Matthew Maher) to design a sneaker prototype worthy of the player’s endorsement.
Bookended by archive footage and photographs, Air confidently dribbles through a condensed timeline, anchored by Damon’s winning performance.
Affleck’s unfussy direction allows Convery’s snappy dialogue and sparkling chemistry between the starry ensemble cast to propel his film within shooting distance of the hoop before he slam dunks a climactic, heart-on-sleeve boardroom speech. At the end of the 1984 season, Jordan was named NBA Rookie of the Year. Affleck’s engrossing and crowd-pleasing picture soars in his shoes.
8/10
THE SUPER MARIO BROS MOVIE (PG)
Directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic sensibly choose computer animation as their medium to gallop through a colour-saturated origin story, which includes a training montage set to Bonnie Tyler’s Holding Out For A Hero that gleefully explains mystery blocks and power-ups.
Screenwriter Matthew Fogel demonstrates unbridled affection for Mario’s legacy, engineering set pieces around different iterations of the games such as styling Mario and Luigi’s journey to their first plumbing job as a side-scrolling 2D platform level then upgrading to eyepopping 3D for a turbo-charged kart race along Rainbow Road and a fiery final showdown.
The divisive issue of Chris Pratt’s accent as Mario is dismissed with tongue wedged in cheek while Jack Black scene-steals as a lovesick villain Bowser, who croons a hilariously overwrought ballad in Princess Peach’s honour in a Tenacious D style. Subtlety: Game over. Fast-paced, family-friendly fun.
6/10
THE POPE’S EXORCIST (15)
Oscar winner Russell Crowe leads the cast of director Julius Avery’s supernatural horror thriller based on the books An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories penned by Father Gabriele Amorth, Chief Exorcist of the Vatican.
Written for the big screen by Michael Petroni and Evan Spiliotopoulos, The Pope’s Exorcist follows Amorth as he investigates cases at the behest of the pontiff (Franco Nero). In most instances, Amorth refers the afflicted to doctors and psychiatrists but in two per cent of cases, the exorcist believes he is in the presence of genuine darkness.
The Pope asks Amorth to focus his attention on a young boy called Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney), who has supposedly been possessed by a demon.
Local priest Father Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto) is woefully unprepared to tackle this ancient evil so Amorth lends his years of experience and he inadvertently uncovers a far-reaching conspiracy that the Vatican has attempted to keep secret for centuries.