'BlackBerry' Review: When Perfection Becomes “Good Enough”
This review contains mild spoilers for BlackBerry, based on historical events.
(L-R) Jay Baruchel & Glenn Howerton in BlackBerry. Courtesy of IFC Films.
I’ve never truly owned a BlackBerry. Maybe it’s a product of my generation, but aside from the broken BlackBerry I got at nine months old, I’ve only ever owned an iPhone. This is what I took going into BlackBerry, a slick tech film driven by the need for evolution and the lack of perfection we can ever achieve. We open in a meeting between RIM founders Mike Lazardis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Matthew Johnson, who triple-duties as this film’s co-writer and director) and Jim Balsilie (the electric Glenn Howerton of It’s Always Sunny in Philidelphia). Just from the opening sequence, we learn enough about our characters and the stereotypes that they fall into through the sharp, intelligent writing from Johnson and Matthew Miller. In this first sequence, we watch Mike, after entering Jim’s office, break open his phone and tamper with it to stop its white noise buzzing, which he attributes to the fact that it’s made in China. Though Balsilie initially rejects their pitch, he ultimately decides to board RIM after unfortunate circumstances from his own job, and somehow convinces Mike and Doug to bring him on as their co-CEO, and give him a 33% stake in the company plus a $125,000 signing bonus. For Jim, the world of tech isn’t one, he’s familiar with, but the world of business is. We’re instantly drawn into the film’s story as we watch the beginnings of mobile phones and the one that changed the world forever.
One of the most interesting (and strange) things about BlackBerry is that while it follows a conventional three-act structure, it truly only has a beginning and an end, but not a middle. It takes in the benefit of us knowing how this story goes and rolls with it, extracting the interesting, almost thrilling parts of the stories and making us focus on that as opposed to the corporate monotony of the stretches of success. For the most part, the conflicts created are engaging, especially in the third act, when we can find the tipping points for these people, finding out what it’ll take for them to betray their morals and each other.
BlackBerry. Courtesy of IFC Films.
Perhaps the most impressive thing BlackBerry does is the way it weaves the arcs of its characters, primarily Jay Baruchel’s character, Mike. We’re told everything we need to know about him within the opening minutes, and even though so much information is thrown at us over the next ~90 minutes, the film’s final, haunting shot makes us think back to the opening, and truly ponder the journey we were taken on, given insight into an industry we all reap the benefits from, but disregard when it comes to the inner workings and competitions that it holds on the business side. This intoxicating energy is what allows BlackBerry to avoid falling into the conventional traps that hurt most films that open with the title card “Based on a true story.” This, and the fact that somehow, the film gets us to root for its morally misguided *protagonist* (Jim Balsilie), is what makes the film an impressive standout in a year where we’re learning about the origins of a new snack or clothing item every few weeks.
Although the film has a full two-hour runtime (strangely the same as Air, another film in this subgenre), the quick, do-it-and-move-on pacing makes the experience of watching it one that feels actively engaging as opposed to dragging us through a story of which we already know the ending. BlackBerry also cashes in great performances from its two leads, particularly from Glenn Howerton as a character who, by all technical standards, we should hate. But somehow, Howerton’s mix of assholery and charisma forces us to root for him, and it’s about time that he’s able to progress from laughs on It’s Always Sunny to dazzling viewers on the big screen. There are some minor issues in pacing and structuring, but the camerawork and sheer amounts of time that Howerton yells, “Fuck you!,” is more than enough to get me on board for a movie that feels like if aspects of Succession were crossed with The Social Network. ∎ This Week Media
