BlackBerry

“Blackberry” is a film about the failure and spectacular collapse of the world’s first smart phone. Adapting Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry” for the screen, director Matt Johnson creates an entertaining look at contemporary history with his tale of the rise and fall of a revolutionary gadget that changed the world forever. In this unconventional story of modern business failure at the hands of fraud and greed, the film tells the history of Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), the two men responsible for the creation and marketing of the BlackBerry smart phone. It was one of the first of its kind, featuring a pocket device (with a keyboard) that could be used for calls, texts and e-mail messaging. It was a revolutionary idea that was dismissed by many of the major players, until Balsillie saw a massive opportunity in the product and the nerdy co-founders of the company. Lazaridis and his partner Doug (Johnson) lacked business savvy and the know-how to deal with the sharks who dominated the world of corporate technology, and Balsillie became the pitbull they needed to whip the business into shape and bring in the discipline needed to run a tight, successful company. The film takes viewers through the BlackBerry timeline from concept to eventual defeat, starting in 1996 up until 2016. The mid-nineties seems like a time that was so far away, but it wasn’t that long ago. (Being transported back to a world without a smart phone in every pocket is nearly unimaginable nowadays). The film has a retro look and feel that’s very corporate and drab, which is a great fit for the material, and Johnson’s storytelling is comprehensive but always entertaining, with a good mix of business-oriented drama and light comedy. The most interesting parts of the story are when PalmPilot CEO Carl Yankowski (Cary Elwes) hints at a hostile takeover, but Balsillie outthinks him by launching a grassroots marketing campaign that made the Blackberry a highly sought after status symbol. He saved the company, which makes for an eventual bittersweet demise. On the other hand, he also directly led to its end with some shady stock manipulation that got him in trouble with the SEC. The film is well cast with standout work from Baruchel, especially when he begins to crack with the realization that Apple is getting ready to kill his invention and his company with their upcoming iPhone, a product with the highest consumer interest of any item in history. The characters are flawed human beings (and in the case of Balsillie, a total jerk), but they aren’t impossible to root for. Ultimately a reflection on failure, “BlackBerry” is an interesting and fun film about the competitiveness of Silicon Valley and the men who made some massive mistakes on their journey to the top. Their position at the highest rung of the tech world was brief, crippled by the innovators at Apple. By: Louisa Moore

The script seems to be written mostly from the perspective of Jim Balsillie, a businessman that was co-CEO of Blackberry, while engineers take a backseat. This follows the general tendency in film to glorify businessmen, treating the people who actually conceptualize, design and implement the products (i.e., do the core work that is societally useful) as mere sidekicks. The general timeline is right and many of the major events in the history of Blackberry are there, but none are described in enough detail for viewers to appreciate the engineering successes that led to Blackberry rising to global prominence, nor the business mismanagement that tanked it. The engineering details that made it in are often confused or misleading (e.g., Blackberry did not invent push messaging, and their prototype wasn't pulled from thin air overnight). It gives the impression most of the source material came from interviews with non-technical people, or else "Great Man" personality drama was the only material the filmmakers understood well enough to put in a script. The film has confusingly mixed messaging. It perpetuates the notion that engineers are tinkering children that get nothing done without big daddy managers pushing them to work long hours and "just make it work", damn the technical details! Yet it repeatedly also tries to show the businessmen as hustlers that use bluster and hand waving to cover up their general uselessness and technical incompetence, as well as the resulting harmful decisions they make that ultimately resulted in the downfall of Blackberry. Perhaps the writers wanted to portray Balsillie as a clever shark, but based on his actions in the film alone you would think he was largely a egomaniacal leech that the meek engineers could not figure out how to get rid of. Indeed it is unclear why the engineers brought him on to begin with - they probably would have been better off without him and the other businessmen he brought on.

I kept hearing people say this movie was actually not bad for a movie about BalckBerry, and you know what, they were right! Glenn Howerton plays an incredibly entertaining psycho as always. Jay Baruchel does the befuddled muppet thing with aplomb. And then the doofus sidekick guy who's actually more insightful than others give him credit for also does a good job. It's an easy mindless entertainment watch. Spoiler alert, the company does really well then it doesn't.

In one sense, this is a comedic action film. In another sense, it's a biopic of a lying, cheating, ruthless, tech businessman of a slightly less rank than Bezos, Zuckerberg and the "Don't be Evil" Page/Brin team. Overall, it's brilliantly cast and paced. It moves along at the perfect clip for this kind of action film. I was interested in the technology, but that truly wasn't the story.

With the release of such innovative communications products as the Apple and Android smartphones, questions began to circulate about the future viability of onetime market leader BlackBerry, a line of devices that subsequently went into rapid decline. Ironically, that real-life business world narrative itself raises comparable questions about the viability of a movie that tells the BlackBerry story. Nevertheless, writer-director Matt Johnson’s third feature outing brings the ill-fated account of the rise and fall of this Canadian-made smartphone company in the global telecommunications marketplace. Seeing how the company was run, however, it probably shouldn’t come as any surprise why it ultimately failed – shady financial management, ego-driven unbridled greed, undisciplined employees and constant managerial scrambling to remain competitive, despite some surprisingly savvy marketing aimed at making the BlackBerry an enviable status symbol, especially among business clients. But is this kind of material really sufficiently engaging for a feature film? I sure don’t think so, especially since it’s about a company and product that ultimately flopped. It’s a cinematic exercise akin to “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” (1971) trying to take on Silicon Valley giants. The film also gets exceedingly technical at times, making for a film that cyber nerds may find awesomely cool but that casual viewers are likely to see as tedious and confusing. And, by the picture’s second half, with the handwriting on the wall and the parade of unending snafus continuing, it’s difficult to maintain interest in how events unfold and eventually play out. To its credit, this release features some fine performances, most notably by Saul Rubinek, Michael Ironside and Independent Spirit Award nominee Glenn Howerton, as well as an excellent and often-ironic soundtrack. However, in a larger sense, “BlackBerry” also represents a somewhat disconcerting trend in movies that’s gaining traction – films based on the back stories of products and businesses. Besides this offering, 2023 also saw the release of films about sneakers (“Air”), videogame retailing (“Dumb Money”) and even snack foods (“Flamin’ Hot”). While there’s nothing inherently wrong with pictures about business and commerce, these offerings are innately little more than two-hour feature-length commercials for their wares. Indeed, are these commodities becoming our new screen idols? It calls to mind actor Paul Newman’s observation years ago about the emergence of a robot and a shark becoming our new movie icons, but, as different as they were, even they weren’t as shamelessly commercial as these new contenders are. Releases like this should indeed give us all pause to think about what kinds of movies we want to plunk down our hard-earned money to watch.

The downfall part is a bit sudden as compared to the first 2/3 of the film, but still a very fun watch.

Thoroughly fascinating to watch this unfold. 'BlackBerry' reminded me a lot of fellow 2023 flick 'Air', two movies that were in fact released within months of each other interestingly. Both are great watches, with this being one I particularly enjoyed. It's super well put together. The two hours go by fast, the story is presented in such a way that there wasn't a single moment I was even the slightest bit uninterested - there's a great flow to proceedings. Jay Baruchel is excellent throughout, so is Glenn Howerton. The whole cast do good work, amusing to see SungWon Cho (aka ProZD) appear too! I remember BlackBerry being huge at my high school back in the day, though based on the timeline shown in this movie it was very much during the company's spiral - guess our parents couldn't afford iPhones at that point!😂 I am still yet to own an iPhone mind you, guess I'm in the severe minority with that one. I did own a Blackberry though and I'm with Lazaridis: keyboard >>> touchscreen, all day! Same goes for buttons >>> sensors for TVs, while we're here. I'm stuck in the dark ages, I know I know. Tangent over, this is a quality film!