It doesn’t matter if you’re an Android or Apple phone user. If you’re reading this review on your phone, you and I owe thanks to Mike Lazaridis – the genius behind the world’s first smart phone. This film serves as a biopic on the rise and demise of the titular smartphone, but more importantly, fatal decisions and back stabbing that took parent company Research In Motion from owning 45% of global market share in 2010, to 0% today. While there are several inspiring films about underdogs that made it to the big leagues through grit and determination, BlackBerry is an anti-thesis of what happens to an underdog when the opposite comes into play. It is still an inspiring film on how a nobody becomes a somebody, and then a heartbreaking lesson on how a somebody reverts to being a nobody. This is played out in two parts perceived as ‘Rise’ and ‘Demise’.
In the first part, we are introduced to Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Douglas Fregin (Director and co-writer Matt Johnson), best friends and also creators of Canadian tech company Research In Motion. Along with the rest of their small team, they are a young bunch of nerds who have movie posters and movie nights in the office, and play video games on their work computers. They are smart and sassy as hardcore IT techies with Mike often scribbling solutions on the fly, while Doug being the voice of reason in their decisions. What they are not, is being street smart when it comes to making a sales pitch. This is where Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) comes in as Co-CEO of RIM. Jim not only sees huge potential in Mike and Doug’s revolutionary invention that packs a modem, web browser, push email in a pocketable cell phone device with a tactile QWERTY keyboard, his natural ability to charm the suits at big telecom providers like AT&T and Bell Atlantic turns out to be the catalyst in establishing Blackberry as the world’s first smartphone.
The second part is about the wrecking ball that follows a chain reaction of bad decisions and egotistical narcissism. Murphy’s Law and capitalism is at play in shark infested waters. While indecision can be forgiven and overcome with reasonable rectification, the glaring problem seems to be complacency and total denial or underestimation of what the competitor can do. And that competitor, as we now know, turns out to be Steve Jobs. The severe damage about to be incurred by RIM, is a notorious reminder that we either surf with the tides of change, or stay and drown. Adding to Mike’s nightmare of the emerging iPhone concept, is Jim’s draconian method of getting aforementioned nerds to give up all semblance of a life and put in eighty-hour work weeks. As much as Jim can be undeniably charming, he is a master arm-twister with tyrannical goal setting. Success at this level is as ugly as it is futile. Thus starts the beginning of the end of Blackberry as a smartphone.
From a production standpoint, BlackBerry is near flawless in its narrative and delivery through virtually unknown actors. Baruchel has some exposure to bratpack comedies with the likes of Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill. Here, his conviction is in personifying the irony of a person who is a repetitive genius but lacks the vision of how to stay in the game of evolving technology. Equally commanding is Howerton in a way that we are unsure if he’s in the lead or playing a supporting role. Howerton is also the only American actor in this film and even gets the Canadian accent spot-on down to ‘out’ pronounced as ‘auoot’. BlackBerry sits way up shoulder-to-shoulder with The Wolf of Wall Street, or the similarly themed Facebook origins film The Social Network. That crack of humour is subtle albeit ever present. Doug for example, is clearly a Sylvester Stallone Rambo & Rocky fan, but becomes a lamb when surrounded by corporate bigwigs. The humour here is just a thin layer masking the tragic story of an unknown company that thought outside the box and made an incredible breakthrough. And that breakthrough was the ability to shrink the whole world to a point where we didn’t need to call or commute to communicate. RIP RIM.
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