Blackberry – Review
124 Minutes, Rated R
Written by Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller
Directed by Matt Johnson
**NOTE: this post may be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, you can read Mark’s review below. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
The story of the meteoric rise and catastrophic demise of the world’s first smartphone.
Read that synopsis again, boys and girls… the FIRST smartphone.
It wasn’t Apple. It was Research In Motion (RIM) who created the Blackberry, which pioneered the entire smartphone industry and at its peak controlled 45% of the cellphone market.
The “Crackberry.”
Now, I’ve never watched any of the Steve Jobs/Apple films, or even The Social Network, so I can’t compare those to this, but what I can say is that this movie completely rocks.
Who can’t love a movie about a rag-tag group of early 1990s geeks who believe they can do anything because, well, why can’t they?
We also get a peek at the heady days of dot-com venture capital and those loose workplaces made famous by Google, Twitter, etc.
Jay Baruchel is great as Mike Lazaridis, the real brains behind the Blackberry. A true pioneer, perfectionist, and perhaps as important to the world we live in today as people like to think Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg are. A truly solid performance, one to be commended.
With a solid cast including Glenn Howerton as the only businessman of the bunch, who sees the potential profit in RIM nad channels his best Wall Streeet Michael Dougles, and Michael Ironsides as an old-school COO brought in to wrangle the unruly bunch of misfits who possess no sense of discipline, Blackberry feels 100% true to its time.
Is it 100% true to the events? Probably in the broadstrokes, up to and including the stock manipulation and executive excesses.
But what Blackberry truly does right is make you feel for Mike, for his long-suffering friend and partner Doug (Matt Johnson), a bright, if somewhat flighty (to say the least), counterpoint to Mike’s near-manic devotion to perfection, and the rest of the crew who were brought down not by the original iPhone, but rather by their inability to see outside the paradigm they (mostly Mike) created when he blew up the cellphone industry in the first place.
A raucous ride for those who remember when Blackberry was everywhere and who may have wondered what really happened to it.
Blackberry hits theaters May 12 and stars Jay Baruchel, Matt Johnson, Glenn Howerton, Michael Ironside, Saul Rubinek, Cary Elwes, Rich Sommer, SungWon Cho, and Michelle Giroux.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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