Film Review of the Week

Drama

Air (12A)

Review: 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 world class players don’t wear third place 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.

Animation

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (PG)

Review: For more than 40 years, moustachioed Italian plumber Mario has been the enduring symbol of the Nintendo video game company. He has clambered up scaffolding and ladders to defeat Donkey Kong, rescued Princess Toadstool from Bowser in Super Mario Bros., intentionally caused high-speed collisions with discarded banana skins in Mario Kart and somersaulted through colourful environments on the N64, Wii and Switch consoles. With his acrobatic abilities, daredevil attitude and comical costume changes into a yellow cat, bumblebee, raccoon and flying squirrel, Mario is perfectly suited to the big screen but one previous effort in 1993 to translate his hijinks was an unmitigated disaster (a live-action Super Mario Bros. starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo).

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 the brothers’ journey to their first plumbing job as a side scrolling 2D platform level then upgrading to eye-popping 3D for a turbo-charged kart race along Rainbow Road and a fiery final showdown.

Brooklyn-based brothers Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) quit their day jobs with demolition company the Wrecking Crew to kickstart a family plumbing business. It’s a baptism of fire for the siblings and their old foreman (Sebastian Maniscalco) mocks the decision to go solo: “You’re a joke and you always will be.” To disprove the naysayers, Mario and Luigi venture into Manhattan’s sewers to repair a burst water main and they are sucked into a mysterious green pipe.

Luigi is propelled into the Dark Lands and falls into the clutches of fire-breathing turtle Bowser (Jack Black) and his Koopa army, spearheaded by sorcerer Kamek (Kevin Michael Richardson). Meanwhile, Mario emerges in the Mushroom Kingdom, where Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) rules benevolently over loyal subjects including Toad (Keegan-Michael Key). Peach hopes to repel Bowser’s imminent attack by forging an alliance with the Jungle Kingdom and she travels with Mario to a royal audience with ruler Cranky Kong (Fred Armisen) and his son Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen).

The Super Mario Bros. Movie appeals unabashedly to die-hard fans, almost to its detriment by shoehorning so many characters into 92 breathless minutes, but Horvath and Jelenic’s picture doesn’t alienate newcomers to this topsy-turvy universe. The divisive issue of Pratt’s accent is dismissed with tongue wedged in cheek while Black scene-steals as a lovesick Bowser, who croons a hilariously overwrought ballad in Princess Peach’s honour in a Tenacious D stylee. Subtlety: game over. Fast-paced, family-friendly fun: game on.