Film Reviews: Air | Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre | Leonor Will Never Die
Air (15) ****
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (15) **
Leonor Will Never Die (15) ****
Befitting its title, Ben Affleck’s new film Air delivers a breezy account of the scrappy origins of the Nike Air Jordan, the game-changing basketball shoe named for future superstar Michael Jordan and subsequently transformed into one of the most successful brands of all time. As such it’s neither basketball movie nor sports biopic (Jordan only appears in archival footage). Rather it’s a film about the machinations of a billion-dollar idea and how closely aligned success and failure often are — something that also helps makes Air more of an underdog story, even as it’s serving up, on the surface at least, a kind of fist-pumping celebration of corporate triumphalism.
To help sell us on the underdog angle, Air’s focus is Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), Nike’s paunchy basketball aficionado. The year is 1984 and, after Affleck hits us hard with a nostalgic scene-setting montage (soundtracked to - what else? - Dire Straights’ Money for Nothing), we’re introduced to Sonny schlepping round college basketball games, trying to sign endorsement deals with players who only want to wear Adidas or Converse. Rather than take a chance on three upcoming prospects who may or may not do anything in the sport, though, he wants to bet everything on the young Michael Jordan, who’s yet to play a professional game.
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Hide AdAlthough everyone knows the outcome, Affleck mines drama from how close Sonny repeatedly comes to failure and relishes the chance to present him as a gambling-addicted maverick in a suddenly risk-averse public company that now has to answer to shareholders more interested in the bottom line than the finish line. Affleck himself plays Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight, turning him into a comically aloof boss who frequently shoots down Sonny’s ideas as he lounges on a sofa in his office beneath a poster outlining his own ten rule-breaking mantras for success. As a director, though, Affleck’s smartest move is casting Viola Davis as Jordan’s mother, Deloris. Devoting much of the film’s second-half to Sonny’s efforts to persuade her to take a meeting with Nike, Affleck gives Davis the space to dominate every scene she’s in as Deloris negotiates the industry transforming deal that will guarantee her son a slice of any future profits Nike makes from using her son’s name and likeness.
Like The Social Network and Steve Jobs, the film walks a delicate line here between exploring and critiquing a corporate disruptor and providing an outright celebration of rampant capitalism. Air doesn’t go as far as those films in exposing the ruthlessness underlying their respective success stories, however. In fact, you could argue Affleck doesn’t want to spoil the party much at all, except that, late in the film, he precedes a discussion between Sonny and Nike's marketing exec Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) about the company's use of cheap labour in Taiwan with a discussion about Bruce Springsteen’s then brand-new hit Born in the USA, specifically how its amped-up production and surging chorus make it easy to mistake it for a patriotic anthem when its lyrics are explicitly criticising the government’s betrayal of its citizens. It’s only a short scene, but it suggests that in turning the Air Jordan story into such a slick and entertaining movie, Affleck is really asking why we tend to venerate success at the cost of everything else.
One of the constant frustrations of Guy Ritchie’s career as a self-styled auteur of the crime caper is that his undeniable visual flair is frequently undermined by a lot of half-formed ideas. This leads to movies that look good, but often run out of steam. Terrible title aside, that’s the chief problem with Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, a goofy spin on the Bond and the Mission: Impossible movies starring Ritchie stalwart Jason Statham. He plays Orson Fortune, the kind of off-the-books private contractor the government uses when clandestine assignments require complete deniability. Brought in to retrieve a briefcase containing an AI-powered McGuffin stolen by some Eastern European gangsters, he’s teamed up with a new group of specialists, among them Aubrey Plaza, getting a welcome chance to flex her action movie muscles as a tech-ops maverick. Sadly, proceedings soon take a meta-turn for the worse as Orson recruits an action movie star (Josh Hartnett) to infiltrate the inner circle of his biggest fan: a billionaire arms dealer (Hugh Grant) who may or may not be involved in the theft of the aforementioned briefcase. Thenceforth proceedings trundle chaotically along until the whole thing comes to a sputtering close, as if all involved just decided to call it quits and hit the nearest bar.
Proof that big budgets are no replacement for imagination can be found in in Leonor Will Never Die, a post-modern action movie from the Philippines about a retired female genre director (the wonderful Sheila Francisco) who slips into the world of an unrealised dream project after a falling TV knocks her unconscious. Martika Ramirez Escobar’s debut feature exploits this high-concept premise for all its worth, riffing with great affection on cheap Filipino action movies from the 1980s with a film-within-a-film structure that enables her to credibly transform the titular Leonor into the protagonist of a trashy revenge epic. It’s not an empty gimmick either. There are sly take-downs of the thin line between politics and the entertainment industry and amusingly audacious attempts to disrupt the formulaic nature of filmmaking. It’s all done with much energy and great humour, like a scrappier Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Air is in cinemas from 5 April, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is streaming on Prime Video from 7 April, Leonor Will Never Die is in cinemas from 7 April.