Black­Ber­ry – first-look review

When the very first iPhone was unveiled in Jan­u­ary 2007, it was the tech­no­log­i­cal equiv­a­lent of cross­ing the Rubi­con. Noth­ing was the same after Steve Jobs revealed his plan to com­bine the touch-screen capa­bil­i­ties of the ubiq­ui­tous iPod with a mobile phone, and 15 years lat­er, Apple claimed the major­i­ty of the US smart­phone mar­ket, despite con­sis­tent­ly hav­ing the most expen­sive hand­sets out of any provider. But before Apple, there was anoth­er fruit-based titan of the smart phone indus­try, who final­ly get their dues in Matt Johnson’s off­beat comedy.

When we meet tech experts Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fre­gin (Matt John­son), they’re pitch­ing a new phone to dis­in­ter­est­ed cor­po­rate bod Jim Bal­sil­lie (Glenn How­er­ton). The idea sounds sim­ple by mod­ern stan­dards: put a com­put­er in the consumer’s pock­et. No one real­ly thinks it’s pos­si­ble – not least because Mike and Doug don’t exact­ly have the killer instinct when it comes to busi­ness. Jim even­tu­al­ly comes on board, sens­ing an oppor­tu­ni­ty (and fired from his pre­vi­ous job due to his, uh, unco­op­er­a­tive atti­tude) and han­dles the busi­ness side while Mike con­cen­trates on the tech.

There’s no short­age of media reck­on­ing with the tech­no­log­i­cal boom of the 90s/​00s, which arguably begin with David Fincher’s beloved Face­book dra­ma The Social Net­work back in 2010. Since then there’s been two films about Steve Jobs, a series about the rise and fall of WeWork, a series about Ther­a­nos Girl­boss Eliz­a­beth Holmes, and even a clutch of films about var­i­ous whistle­blow­ers who used the inter­net and social media (Edward Snow­den, Julian Assange, now Real­i­ty Win­ner) to expose the truth about gov­ern­ment mal­prac­tice. Work­ing in such a sat­u­rat­ed cor­ner of the biopic mar­ket, it’s wise that John­son brings to the sub­ject mate­r­i­al his idio­syn­crat­ic film­mak­ing style, using a mul­ti-cam set-up allow­ing for a more DIY style, and veer­ing away from ven­er­at­ing the char­ac­ters through dis­play­ing the flaws which were both fea­tures and bugs.

At moments it feels like Black­Ber­ry is a par­o­dy of the genre – a moment which pur­ports the phone was named after a break­fast stan on Lazaridis’ shirt is par­tic­u­lar­ly cheeky – but the inten­tion is def­i­nite­ly still to shine a light on an untold part of Cana­di­an his­to­ry, which played a major role in how we com­mu­ni­cate today. It’s per­haps iron­ic that so much of world­wide com­mu­ni­ca­tion has been dic­tat­ed by a group of geeks who pre­ferred to be shut in dark rooms host­ing LAN par­ties or watch­ing They Live for the hun­dredth time, but John­son has a keen affec­tion for his sub­jects, imbu­ing the mate­r­i­al with humour and snap­py pac­ing which keeps the audi­ence on their toes.

How­er­ton is the stand-out per­former as the bull­ish Bal­sil­lie, a shark in a fish pond, who is able to take Black­Ber­ry from a sin­gle man cave in Water­loo, Ontario to a major play­er in North Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ca­tions in less than a decade. The con­trast between Balsillie’s ruth­less busi­ness mind and the awk­ward Lazaridis and Fre­gin is enter­tain­ing, and avoids the ​‘dif­fi­cult genius’ trope which haunts the sub­genre by empha­sis­ing that Black­Ber­ry was very much a team effort, and the indi­vid­u­al­ism that fol­lowed lat­er is part of the rea­son it failed.

For any­one that remem­bers how pop­u­lar the Black­Ber­ry was at the height of its fame, it’s a fun lit­tle jaunt down mem­o­ry lane, but the film also high­lights the prob­lem with so much mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy and the peo­ple involved in cre­at­ing it: a lack of inter­est in the longevi­ty or craft of their prod­uct. BlackBerry’s switch to cheap­er man­u­fac­tur­ing and con­tin­ued fail­ure to inno­vate, com­bined with the frac­tur­ing of their lead­er­ship due to finan­cial greed and some dodgy stock option­ing, puts the writ­ing on the wall.