BlackBerry
Two mismatched entrepreneurs – egghead innovator Mike Lazaridis and cut-throat businessman Jim Balsillie – joined forces in an endeavour that was to become a worldwide hit in little more than a decade. The device that one of them invented and the other sold was the BlackBerry, an addictive mobile phone that changed the way the world worked, played and communicated. But just as BlackBerry was rising to new peaks, it also started losing its way through the fog of Smartphone wars, management indecision and outside distractions, eventually leading to the breakdown of one of the most successful ventures in the history of the tech and business worlds.
- Released: 2023-05-12
- Runtime: 121 minutes
- Genre: Comedy, Drama
- Stars: Glenn Howerton, Rich Sommer, Saul Rubinek, Michael Ironside, Matt Johnson, Jay Baruchel, Cary Elwes, Martin Donovan, SungWon Cho, Michelle Giroux, Mark Critch, Ben Petrie, Ethan Eng
- Director: Matt Johnson
Comments
- sadmansakibayon - 11 June 2024
"A nostalgia fest for the late 90s"
A tale of the meteoric rise and equally meteoric fall of BlackBerry, from an idea to cornering nearly 50% of the mobile market to 0% of that same market, this is a pretty fun and exciting biopic... well more about the life of a company and product than any one particular person involved, but still a kind of biopic.
With three main roles representing the main tensions in the company, from Jay Baruchel's Mike Lazaridis as the ideas engineer guy, Matthew Johnsson as his partner suffering from slightly arrested development which also allows him to stay true to the ideals even as the company starts growing and the real highlight of Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie, the boardroom shark that comes in to the company to both navigate the dangerous waters of business and make his own fortune.
A nostalgia fest for the late 90s and early 2000s, a time when we were all happier destroyed by the 24 hour entertainment of the iPhone, a time when smartphones were a work thing, you get all the modem sounds, needle drops and references to Sid Meier's Civilization that you would need. As a millennial nerd myself it scratched a little nostalgic itch while being both entertaining and quite funny at times. - SnoopyStyle - 6 April 2024
corporate biopic genre
It's 1996. CEO Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and his best friend Douglas Fregin (Matt Johnson) are co-founders of the struggling tech company Research in Motion in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. They have a horrible pitch meeting with aggressive businessman Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). Balsillie gets fired from his job and talks his way into becoming the new co-CEO of RIM.
This is yet another corporate biopic. Yes, corporations are people too and so are their products. This one cuts a little closer. I made a little pocket change from the stock. Nothing life changing. I left way before the top and luckily before the end unlike a friend I know. It's interesting to see these characters come to life. They form fascinating relationships and compelling personalities. At the time, I thought they had no chance against the iPhone, but maybe they could retain a small market as the no-frills, text-based, secured, unsaved communication devices for corporate drones. I knew they could never catch up to the iPhone. The movie does clarify a few ideas from that saga. There are a few scenes where it's trying too hard to look like a 90's indie. I really don't like the camera zooming into the one female engineer. The premise works much better without the zoom allowing the audience to do the work. The performances are great. It's a great entry into the corporate biopic genre. - brentsbulletinboard - 22 February 2024
Ho-hum -- and a Troubling New Cinematic Trend
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.
