"I mean, if we're going to make it, we gotta take risks." "Spoken like a man without a seven-year-old on Sunday afternoon."

I have been lied to. I have been tricked and bamboozled. The past two years has given me a faint impression that Air was a film in the lineage of Moneyball: a treatise about what the industry is and was, an underdog story, and an interesting story at that, presented with panache and polish. And, having considered Shoe Dog an above-average autohagiography, I was excited to finally watch it!

In reality, this film is an overproduced infomercial, devoid of gravitas or tone or thesis besides "boy, Michael Jordan sure is cool". And yet, despite that, the film does not even treat Michael Jordan seriously as a person or a brand, referring to him only in the prophetic perfect tense and giving him the same amount of depth that every other character has, which is to say close to none.

The reason I am so drawn to the cynical reason of this film's existence is because the cynical reason is pretty much the only one I can summon. None of the actors in this film are trying very hard to do anything at all (with, it should be said, the exception of Viola Davis, who effortlessly commands every single scene and who brings the only sole source of intensity and realism in a film too interested in needle-dropping the 1980s to bother much of anything else.) Even serious scenes are undercut: Jason Bateman's character gets to deliver a very sweet and resonant monologue about the idea of taking risks, and then the characterization of "you've got a seven-month-old you can only see on Sundays" vanishes into the air, never to be spoken of again, except for one or two lingering pans onto Jason Bateman looking vaguely somber, as though there was a studio note that said, 'Hey, make sure audiences care about this guy.'

The whole thing just feels fake and plasticine in the same way I grew to hate Ted Lasso, as if caricature and levity were knobs that you could dial up or down — never too far in any direction — depending on how the scene demands it. And this bothers me, because I think there's a good story, an interesting story to be told here about Jordan before he was Jordan, about Nike before it was Nike, about the birth of the sports-industrial complex. And the film is not interested in telling this story; this film, again, seems interested in very little at all.

People compare this film with Moneyball. This, I emphasize, is sacrilege. Moneyball is a rich text. Moneyball can be read four different ways at four different ages: it is a story about the plight of the underdog, it is a story about the struggle between capital and labor, it is a story about a dad having to choose between his daughter and the dream he never quite fulfilled, it is a story about what it means to fight in America, even though you know you're not going to win.

And it does the other parts too. You can watch the Scott Hatteberg home run on YouTube with This Will Destroy You in the background and immediately feel as if — know as if — you have the power to tear down a brick wall, to emerge with clay on your hands and history in your grasp. You can sit back and admire the Sorkin quips delivered in between bites of a seemingly indefatigable supply of snacks consumed by Brad Pitt in an effortlessly perfect performance. It works on both the elemental and intellectual levels — it can be watched and studied and is always rewarding.

Conversely, I'm not sure on what level Air works at all. You can't even say it's an interesting '80s movie, because then you are forced to compare it to Blackberry, a film that came out a fraction of the budget, a fraction of a fanfare, and the same shtick — a blend of "aw, shucks" voyeurism towards the not-so-distant past and a desire to reckon with the distance between that past and our present.

But Blackberry was actually good: it was both anchored and buoyed by interesting performances, it told a meaningful story with wit and conviction, and more than anything it did not feel like I could see the script notes from a ninety-minute meeting between Apple and Jordan Brand, lurking in the margins of the screen like an errant boom mic.

★★