BlackBerry

I was an infant during the notorious boom and bust of BlackBerry. Other than the name being tossed around a number of times throughout my life, I really had no insight into the phenomenon that they apparently were. Now as I’m about to begin an internship in the Bay Area working on consumer mobile phones, I figured this would be as good a time as any to historically contextualize myself. And I think I felt a little disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing egregiously wrong about this film; its performances weren’t offensive and the runtime wasn’t excessive. It just felt perfectly unremarkable to me, which stemmed from two major reasons: half-baked character development and an unimportant story.

My frame of reference for good tech start-up films consists mainly of 2015’s Steve Jobs and 2010’s The Social Network. What draws me back to these films time and time again is not necessarily the fact that the companies they’ve concerned continue to dominate the consumer tech space, but rather that their protagonists are so enrapturing. They are flawed and insensitive while maintaining relatable insecurities and inspiring ambitions. On top of that, these films expertly maintain clarity on what influences these characters and how they come to be who they are at the end of the films.

BlackBerry doesn’t have this. The founder of Research in Motion, Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), is written at first to be this awkward yet endearing inventor who is frustrated with the lack of quality control in consumer devices. He stays this way until about roughly two-thirds of the way through the film. Then bam, suddenly he’s an angry and cornered CEO who, without much hesitation, is perfectly fine with outsourcing the manufacturing of his company’s devices. The time jumps throughout the film accentuated this very jarring switch in personality and made his ultimate downfall only moderately disheartening. Our other major lead, Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie, is immediately unlikable, arrogant, and entitled (his character really paints Harvard in a bad light—yikes), and that is the way he stays throughout the film. While I felt the performance of the character to be one of the better things the film had going for it, his dwindling plot relevance in the third act and his general asshole-ness evoked little emotion from me as well.

My second issue regards the choice of story. As mentioned above, I never personally experienced the supposed zeitgeist that was the BlackBerry and as such don’t really appreciate the events behind this film. But my general knowledge of the history of Silicon Valley kept me asking the same question: were these events really that special? There are tons of examples out there of companies experiencing meteoric rises only to be rapidly supplanted by a new and hungrier firm. AOL, IBM, Kodak, and Yahoo are some examples that immediately come to mind, with many other such examples outside of the tech industry that I can list off the top of my head. So what made the BlackBerry so special that it warranted a film like this one?

Reading back this review, it does come across perhaps more negative than I intended. The film was not at all difficult to get through and had some very nice, if somewhat isolated, aspects—Doug Fregin being one of the best parts. I merely struggled to care about the characters and the events motivating the film, which seemed like they would be much better suited to a documentary. Some performances were strong, but I suspect I won’t think about this film too much in the future.