MICHAEL JORDAN TO THE MAX (Giant Screen Sports/NBA Entertainment) Featuring: Michael Jordan; narrated by Laurence Fishburne. Producers: Don Kempf, Steve Kempf and James D. Stern. Directors: James D. Stern and Don Kempf. MPAA Rating: Unrated Running Time: 45 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
An important note, first of all, about the context in which your humble narrator viewed MICHAEL JORDAN TO THE MAX: The Super Screen theater in my home turf of Salt Lake City is operated by local auto dealership tycoon Larry H. Miller. Miller also happens to be the owner of the Utah Jazz, and he had set up the local premiere of the film as a thank you for employees of the Jazz organization and their families. Never mind that the night of the screening would have been a playoff game for the Jazz had they not been eliminated earlier in the week; never mind that Michael Jordan had chosen as his grand farewell to basketball beating those same Jazz in the 1998 NBA finals with a spectacular final minute of Game 6. These were basketball fans -- how could they not appreciate a tale of the greatest basketball player yet to walk the earth?
It is testimony to the astonishing appeal of Michael Jordan that even those partisans who should despise him still can't help admiring him. He is the sort of larger-than-life figure it seems was born for a big screen documentary -- and in a very limited sense, that's true. MICHAEL JORDAN TO THE MAX focuses on Jordan's final title run with the Chicago Bulls in 1998, making stops for highlights of that year's four playoff series. Interspersed with those highlights, accompanied by commentary from sportscasters and former coaches and teammates, are tales from throughout Jordan's life: his failure to make his high school varsity team; his national championship-winning shot as a freshman at the University of North Carolina; his father's murder in 1993; and his 1994-95 retirement from basketball to pursue his dream of playing professional baseball.
Directors James D. Stern and Don Kempf open the film with a shot of Jordan alone in a gym, soaring through the air for a dunk while the camera sweeps around him in three dimensions, MATRIX-style. The tone is set for a story of Jordan the myth, Jordan the super-hero, which is primarily what MICHAEL JORDAN TO THE MAX delivers. The early moments of the film touch on pieces that added to his mystique. There's the pounding theme of the Alan Parsons Project's "Mammagamma" that made Chicago Bull player introductions a spectacle unto itself. There's the statue outside Chicago's United Center, a bronze of Jordan flying over a defender rendered as a shapeless mass with a helplessly outstretched arm. And there's a montage of Jordan's legacy of ridiculous, physics-defying shots. He's such an unearthly presence in the film that I began to believe he could change history -- even though I knew Chicago had lost one of the playoff games featured, I was still surprised that the last-second shot Jordan took to win the game didn't actually go in.
If all one was looking for from MICHAEL JORDAN TO THE MAX was a sense of his legend writ two stories high, I suppose you could say it was an unqualified success. But there's such an emphasis on Jordan's inhuman will to win that his humanity isn't often in evidence. Sure, there are scenes of Jordan fooling around with kids at a basketball camp, and an effective sequence capturing the ever-present crush of fans that made his every movement a running of the gauntlet. There's just not much sense of what makes Jordan tick. Even when the player himself speaks, it's primarily in the well-rehearsed platitudes of a professional athlete: "I never doubted myself;" "You have to pursue your dream;" etc. It's a shock when we see Jordan getting misty-eyed while discussing his relationship with his father, because it's such an unusually unguarded moment. MICHAEL JORDAN TO THE MAX is content primarily to keep the audience at an admiring arm's-length distance.
It may be unreasonable to expect a piercingly insightful documentary in this particular format. IMAX presentations have carved out visions of the awe-inspiring as their unique dominion, and Jordan certainly fits that description. Yet the film-makers even miss an opportunity to take advantage of the format during their game footage. Instead of taking viewers into the center of real-time basketball games -- in effect, allowing them to be on the court with the legend -- Kempf and Stern use slow-motion for most of their game shots. They don't even bother to maintain chronology within individual games (one disadvantage of the big screen is that you can see the scoreboard in virtually every shot, making it obvious when the film has jumped back a quarter or two just for the sake of a cool image). MICHAEL JORDAN TO THE MAX is all about its star power, the kind that even appeals to a theater full of Jazz fans who would wish for a different kind of changed history. As a big-screen experience, it's all about keeping a hero larger than life.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 incredi-Bulls: 6.
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