BlackBerry (2023)

BlackBerry review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

The rise and fall of the BlackBerry mobile device is a story primed to be a standard business biopic. It’s a tale of fragile relationships, bad business decisions, desperation, legal disputes, greed, and corporate feuds. However, a film like this is only as strong as the direction and the talent. While the cast is rather strong here in matching the key players of BlackBerry from the 1990s to 2000s, they’re expected to do some heavy lifting to make this film work.

On that level of acting, the film is rather admirable. There’s an ease to how Jay Baruchel plays the nerdy and insecure Mike Lazaridis while director Matt Johnson bleeds effortlessly into the fun-loving geek Doug Fregin. The two of them founded Research in Motion (RIM) as a business that works and plays hard. They develop modems and hope to sell phones between their online forum browsing, LAN gaming, and movie nights. Their efforts attracted the attention of businessman Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), who was recently fired. Despite being just as desperate to make money as RIM, he helps push Mike into business deals despite Doug's concerns. Soon, Mike can convince Bell Atlantic to take a chance on his pocket email terminal, BlackBerry.

Things move fast within RMI as their business expands and BlackBerry becomes the most dominant mobile device on the market. The storm clouds of doom soon fall as Mike and Doug become too complacent with their success. Jim starts going behind their backs with his questionable means of acquiring top talents for the company and hockey teams for himself. Attempts to avoid their business being overwhelmed by competition result in tougher working conditions and Doug is fearing a loss of vision as Mike becomes more of a tech boss than an innovator, enduring a grilling from the SEC. And then there's the expected moment where BlackBerry’s days were numbered: the announcement of the iPhone. The days were numbered as Mike struggled to craft a BlackBerry with a keyboard on the screen, only to find himself compromising his vision of not making defective electronics.

Johnson’s direction is decent for this material. He keeps the camera constantly moving through offices as tensions rise. As disorienting as this choice might be, it works surprisingly well in having that frantic feeling of being trapped in the room with people bickering over money and tech. Brainstorm moments of triumph are shared with glee, and failing servers are treated to an emergency level of shouting and dashing between terminals. Making that type of world come alive is a solid cast, but even for a film with Michael Ironside, Howerton steals the show. This is mostly because he has the best lines and gets plenty of opportunities to smash phones when he doesn’t get his way angrily. Most accomplished actors would stroll through this role, but Howerton stomps, and it’s a treat to watch him explode as he struggles to assert his dominance.

BlackBerry buzzes along well enough, serving up some fine performances amid its mildly intriguing tech tale. It doesn’t get lost too much in the specifics of the technology, nor does it try too hard to evoke the drama of the clashing egos. There are comedy moments, but they arrive almost casually within the drama, ranging from Doug’s try-and-fail Star Wars references to the dead-pan delivery of SungWon Cho as a dry engineer. Really, though, the real reason to watch is for Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton at their best, playing off each other incredibly well and elevating what could have been a routine story of “that phone before the iPhone.”