BlackBerry review: how a tech revolution became a geek tragedy
Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton deliver engaging performances in this entertaining tale about the rise and fall of a smartphone pioneer
Film Reviews BlackBerry
Technology delivers all types of incredible societal advances. But the mad-dash nature of Western capitalism and the emotional fitfulness of the consumer marketplace also creates graveyards of arriviste empires—faddish companies with a product or service that intersects heavily with a particular moment in time, but ends in the type of mismanaged disaster only fully understood postmortem. BlackBerry, directed by multi-hyphenate Matt Johnson, is an engaging new film that charts the incredible rise and spectacular flameout of its titular product, the world’s first smartphone—which, for a period of time, controlled 45 percent of the cell phone market and seemed unstoppable as a cultural force.
Spinning off Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s nonfiction book Losing The Signal, Johnson and co-screenwriter Matthew Miller invest heartily in the story’s personalities. But instead of reverence or preciousness, they frame BlackBerry as an oddball workplace dramedy about industry gate-crashers rudely ejected from a party of their own staging.
The film opens in 1996 in Ontario, where Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) oversees a software firm known as Research in Motion which operates like a social club as much as a business. Its culture of immaturity is embodied most robustly by headband-sporting co-founder Douglas Fregin (Johnson again), and the importance of collecting on money contractually owed seems on par with communal video game sessions.
Into this den of juvenilia steps Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), who talks himself into a job as CEO. He quickly recognizes Lazaridis’ value as an inventor and fast-tracks an aggressive plan for a fanciful prototype that will leverage existing data networks and allow customers to quickly access email from their mobile devices. BlackBerry, the product, is a smash hit, and quickly becomes a market leader.
In an act seemingly designed to overtly terrorize his employees, Balsillie brings in as COO Charles Purdy (Michael Ironside), a scowling taskmaster who cancels movie night and derides workers as “little children playing with their little penises.” Balsillie’s strategic disengagement enables him to outmaneuver a takeover bid by Palm, Inc. CEO Carl Yankowski (Cary Elwes, in a small cameo that could stand to be fleshed out) and grow the company even more.
At around the 75-minute mark, the movie jumps forward to 2007, as Apple prepares the launch of its iPhone. While Lazaridis fiddles around with adjusted trackpads for the BlackBerry Bold, other dodgy deals and past corners cut come back to haunt the company, contributing to a fatal down swirl.
BlackBerry admirably shrinks the aperture of its story’s technical elements, and eschews the shrewd social inventorying or scrupulous myth-making that Aaron Sorkin brought to The Social Network and Steve Jobs. While the lack of a bigger look at the global mania the “Crackberry” wrought sometimes feels reductive, the characters here are interesting enough for the most part to acquit the tradeoff.
In broad strokes, the film is closer to something like The Founder, rooted in the shark-y sensibilities of an outside pathogen. It skews more humorous, though, seeking relatable bemusement over narrative tension. It’s not really a tale about business success and failure, but rather the loss of innocence, and the dividing line between adolescence and adulthood.
The other interesting aspect of the story is how, in many ways, Lazaridis and Balsillie represent two sides of the same coin. The former—an absorbed, head-in-the-clouds creative visionary—needed a ruthless, bottom-line-oriented fixer to unlock his full potential. The latter, meanwhile, needed something he could sell, even if he didn’t much understand all the details.
The acting wonderfully abets this interpretation. There’s a nervy, dangerous energy to Howerton’s mesmerizingly icy performance, which registers in an almost animalistic way. Rooted not so much in amorality as a complete lack of any guiding principle other than to always keep moving, Howerton portrays Balsillie as an apex predator who, even when on your “side,” could turn around and eat your face off. Constitutionally disgusted by the undisciplined nature of those surrounding him, Howerton conveys that Balsillie’s approach is less to bend people to his will than to simply operate at altitude, above them.
Baruchel, meanwhile, is afforded a nice chance to stretch. The first two-thirds or so of the movie finds him trading in tones and modes—scatterbrained, anxious, nervous apologia—that will read as familiar to many viewers. In its home stretch, though, as BlackBerry shows the weight of adult choices, Baruchel seeds his performance with small notes of both frustration and regret. It’s a smartly calibrated turn.
On a technical level, Johnson oversees a smart package. A selection of songs by the Stereo MCs, Joy Division, Moby, and The Strokes taps into a general spirit of the changing times without relying on jukebox emotionality. Obviously modestly budgeted, BlackBerry embraces a low-fi vibe that suits it well, especially during the early, DIY days of the company. Cinematographer Jared Raab’s camerawork leans heavily into handheld and slightly voyeuristic, courting an aggressively inquisitive tone, and communicating the silent paradox gripping many of its subjects: we’re succeeding—wildly, actually—but is this in fact sustainable?
Eventually, though, this visual tack reaches a point of diminishing returns. The filmmakers feel so all-in and beholden to this approach that, for example, they cut away from Lazaridis during a pivotal emotional revelation to indulge more over-the-shoulder background detail.
It’s true that an operatic presentation of ruination or consequences wouldn’t fit BlackBerry. But it does feel like the movie misses the chance for some stick-the-landing moments related to the fates of its chief characters. That said, Johnson’s entertaining time capsule does still capture, in its unfussy way, one immutable truth: good times aren’t meant to last forever.
(BlackBerry arrives in theaters on May 12, 2023)
29 Comments
Matt Johnson is brilliant.You should mention that he’s shooting NIRVANNA THE BAND THE MOVIE this summer. And at least mention the dang show.
OMG Is it happening? I’m trying to get everyone I know to see this movie to get more Nirvanna the Band the Show out there. I truly think it would be (would’ve been?) a huge show if more than 1000 people knew about it.A dvd or bluray of the existing episodes is my white whale.
The sad story of many a Canadian TV show.
I remember getting an interview at RIM in the mid-aughts. I was a broke university student looking to get a co-op term at one of the hottest companies in the world. I borrow my parents’ car, pay the $30 in gas, and drive from Toronto to Waterloo. The mid-manager there spends the entirety of the 15-minute interview telling me I had no relevant qualifications and why did I bother to send the resume. Mind you, he was the one to set up the interview, and here I am getting yelled at for wasting half my day trying to get a job. Needless to say, I left with no job in hand and less money than I started with.Anyway, fuck ‘em. I’m going to enjoy watching this record of their incompetence.
So no RIM job for you? I’m sure that was disappointing. Did you offer him the $30?
You should have tried at OpenText, Waterloo’s other big tech company, although less well known to the public. And it’s still around today!
Nice id software reference there.
I’d buy Daikatana from Matt Johnson.
From 2008 to 2013 I worked for SMART Technologies, creator of the SMART Board interactive whiteboard, at one time a global market leader and close-to household name that is often compared to fellow Canadian tech company Research in Motion in terms of its meteoric rise and downfall. Like Blackberrys, SMART Boards were at one point the “it” tech product – they were used on CNN and in CSI and in something like 70% of school classrooms in the US. Just as we were poised to go stratospheric with our business line, a little something called the “iPad” came along and suddenly all of those schools and corporations were spending their tech dollars elsewhere. Shortly after our IPO, the board ousted the founding CEO her husband and brought in some new guys who gutted the place, downsized and sold us off to Chinese giant Foxconn. SMART failed because of two reasons:1. Failure to anticipate the enormous impact the iPad would have on the touch screen market in education and business. 2. Executives who were great at product development and entrepreneurship but had no idea how to run a global tech company.SMART was just like RIM and another Canadian tech giant that collapsed, Nortel. Working there was a once-in-a-career thrill ride that I’ll never recapture. I am still in touch with 20 or 30 of my SMARTian (yes, they called us that) colleagues ten years later. I miss it dearly.
My first software job we were working with Research in Motion on their 2 way pager/ Blackberry pre-cursor, the RiM device. Yes many juvenile jokes were made. And then that product failed miserably, because it was pretty terrible. I was pretty shocked when Blackberry took over the world.
A whole lot of people (myself included) strongly preferred the Blackberry to iphone. The tactile keyboard was much better, and the final version I had was essentially an iphone with a screen that slid up for access to a keyboard. So you got full screen and better functionality. Oh well.
Ditto – not to mention, it was WAY easier to get music, photos, etc. on and off the device – use it just like a USB device, drag and drop – and the telephone functionality itself was vastly superior in terms to iPhoneof sound quality and connectivity.
Completely forgot about the interface – so, SO much better. iTunes is a complete and utter abomination. I simply don’t understand how Apple can’t make a decent file management systems that’s the least bit intuitive.
To this day – and I’ve owned an iPhone for about ten years now – I have music on my laptop that for love or money I cannot get from iTunes onto my phone.
I have the opposite problem – for a good while my entire family was on the same itunes account so I ended up with all kinds of kid-friendly stuff on my phone. I deleted everything from the phone, scrubbed by computer, created a new itunes account and logged in, and still their stuff will randomly show up. It also decides to add music on its own; I had about 800 songs on there after the purge and am now up to around 1,400 despite buying maybe 40 songs over that time. No one at Apple can explain it.
Yeah, I’ve had variations of that happen too – songs I know for a fact that I removed/deleted will randomly reappear to junk up my library. For a company that jerks itself off about how great its user experiences are, it’s frankly stunning how garbage iTunes is
There’s not a single thing about Apple’s user experience that’s worth a shit. Ever been to one of their stores and dealt with a “Genius?”
Twice – both times I got a barely-concealed condescending and dismissive smirk when I told them the model of my iPhone which was [snigger] two versions back of the current one. Couldn’t rush me through quick enough – the answer to my problems was basically, “Get the latest model.” Never mind that it was like a thousand bucks and my phone was only a year old… but that’s like a decade in Apple terms
I feel my blood rising just thinking about it.
I was working at a small company that was bought out by RIM (And thankfully, bought itself back out before things got too grim) and I have this vivid memory of the RIM C-suite making fun of the ‘big slabs of glass’ that the iPhones were at an all-hands event. Like it was just a passing fad. (I also loved BB way more)
I’m still using one of their last Android models, largely because there doesn’t seem to be anything good enough on the market since they stopped making those. I’m certainly not going to settle for an iPhone or an iPhone knockoff, and the small-run hackerphones for True Nerds seem to run $1k+ as well as being unobtanium.
Tapping on glass is demonic, and iOS feels like a demonic operating system with unwanted prompts and pop-ups.Are you using KeyOne or Key2? In a way, the “Made in China” point in the movie has an affect over the last Android, TCL-built phones.For me, I wish we could live in a mobile world with more device diversity. Or an alternative reality where physical keys reigned supreme. The Passport is a really cool device. Please clap and agree.
i used to love keeping a fully charged extra battery in my bag.
Phones come and go, but I miss my Blackberry.
Some of the comments here sound very much like pity parties posted by Blackberry fan boys and girls. Face the facts boys and girls. RIM was epically mismanaged! 😂
I miss having a phone I could clumsily knock against the edge of my desk without having the screen shatter into a million pieces. Actually my pixel isn’t terrible for that, but any iphone I’ve had has been extremely precious even with screen protectors. Anyway, the last holdouts for blackberry I can recall seeing were Canadian public servant managers wandering around Ottawa circa 2017. So, way more recent than you’d think. As far as I know, some of them still have one.
I loved the idea and the design of the Blackberry but the one I had circa 2009-11 was a complete heap of shit.It couldn’t get my work email on there, which was the purpose of getting it, its camera was dogshit in comparison to the iPhone, its memory was woeful and its app functionality was terrible.It was nice as a phone but I switched to iPhone and never looked back. I use a Samsung Fold for work and it’s great too but ultimately, I look back on my Blackberry as a huge disappointment.
I had the one with the little furry clit in the middle of the keyboard, which would get locked in place and begin making – and then immediately cancelling – calls to the first number in my address book. I ended up stamping on it in an alleyway in a fit of – unobserved, I thought – cathartic rage. Composed myself only to find a couple of people looking worriedly at a man jumping up and down on a mobile phone whilst cursing. I do not miss that phone.
I grew up in Waterloo so RIM holds a special place in my heart. Have lots of stories from when they were the dominate force here. Balsillie lived a few minutes from my parents house; Waterloo, at the time, had one neighbourhood that was the “utlra rich” area and then a single street that was also “rich”. Balsillie lived on that single street, had a swimming pool in his front yard. It was a big local story cuz he had to get a bylaw exemption to have the pool in the front (his house backed onto a massive hill).His daughter also got into a fender bender with one of my close friends, Balsillie just wrote a cheque.At one point RIM bought up essentially an entire area of Waterloo for their huge amount of office/manufacturing space they needed. They turned into slumlords; a bunch of small businesses shutdown because they jacked rents to obscene amounts so they’d be forced to leave so they could convert the storefronts and such into RIM offices.Use to see the new BBs out in the wild everywhere, my brothers friend was the “celebrity” guy for RIM. He’d fly wherever to bring celebs new phones and be their personal tech support.