Air (2023) Review

I watched this movie as part of a company event. The movie theater had a bunch of my coworkers, but I didn’t know any of them so I sat by myself. I’m not sure if watching movies at movie theaters alone has been normalized in our society yet, but it seemed perfectly good to me.

The movie was entertaining. The movie is about the journey in which Nike signed Michael Jordan. I skimmed some articles about beforehand so I knew things like the fact that the actor playing Michael Jordan did not show his face in the whole movie. The history about the basketball shoe industry was news to me. I read the book Shoe Dog, so I was aware of Nike’s story and how they made it in the running shoe scene. But I didn’t realize that they had a lot of trouble in the basketball shoe scene. I had no idea that Adidas and Converse were the top dogs in the game before Nike blew up with the Air Jordans. I also didn’t know that there were NBA rules about how much white had to be on the shoe. Nowadays, NBA players wear a ton of colorful shoes so they probably changed the rules. Additionally, I read that Howard White (played by Chris Tucker) was initially not going to be in the movie, but Michael Jordan told the director, Ben Affleck, that Howard was really important to making the deal happen. I’m not sure if this actually happened, but in the movie, Nike creating the Air Jordan prototype from scratch in a weekend. That’s pretty wild in my opinion, but I guess that’s what is possible in a scrappy, risk taking company like Nike.

The acting and the casting was well done. I’m not sure if they needed all the star power, since the story is already interesting, but the actors certainly delivered for me. The footage of old basketball scenes was a great touch and the dialogue flowed pretty well.