Member BlackBerrys?

I own an iPhone.

I’m so used to it, I literally couldn’t imagine having any other phone. Occasionally a friend whips out an Android phone and I immediately think: “That looks so ugly.” 

This is not so much a reflection of taste, as Apple’s complete victory over the smartphone market. They have created a product so perfect — with its own iconic open-user application marketplace to boot — that it feels wrong for people like me to even contemplate owning another phone.

There was a time before the iPhone though. In the larger history of the smartphone wars, Apple were actually a rather late entry. There was a time when the biggest smartphone in the world was the BlackBerry. Remember those? 

I remember them well. There was a time at school when every cool girl had one. There was the stereotypical image of the businessman checking his emails in bed, rudely ignoring his wife in the process. There was the time when having a BlackBerry denoted that you were somebody who meant serious business. 

Canadian Actor-Director Matt Johnson certainly remembers the BlackBerry (2023) too. He gives it the rise-and-fall tech story treatment that we’ve seen recently personified in various streaming TV shows such as The Dropout (Elizabeth Meriwether, 2022) and WeCrashed (Lee Eisenberg & Drew Crevello, 2022). 

On the surface, it may feel like yet another instalment in the entertaining genre of insanely smart nerds who see their ahead-of-the-game ideas meet the crushing reality of the business world. And it definitely is that. But Johnson, also playing 1990s’ slacker Doug, one-half of the idealistic start-up duo alongside Jay Baruchel as the brains-in-the-business Mike Lazaridis, finds a very strong angle by personifying the business side in TV-actor Glenn Howerton’s excellent, dynamic, ballsy performance as co-CEO Jim Balsillie. 

In a fine opening sequence, Balsillie takes a tragic, unfocussed pitch from Doug and Mike, who understand there’s a whole untapped market out there for a phone that also takes emails. He’s totally uninterested, more concerned with his next business meeting. After being unceremoniously fired from his current job, he blows his savings on investing in their company Research in Motion, bringing toxic, highly masculine Glengarry Glen Ross (David Mamet, 1992) energy to their Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993) set up. 

Using sea-sick, Succession-like (Jessie Armstrong, 2018-) cinematography, where the camera never stays still, even in an otherwise simple frame, BlackBerry is a series of entertaining high-stake set-pieces stacked on top of one another. A never-ending combination of bullshit, bluster and brazenness allow them to win over investors, poach top talent and conquer the world. Then it all has to come crashing down.

Like 9/11 in military biopics, we know Steve Jobs’ 2007 iPhone presentation is going to change the whole world. And its funny to hear Lazaridis state that no one wants their keyboard on the screen. It’s how BlackBerry gets there that provides strong, if slight, entertainment value. At times I was a little confused on the technical details and wished Margot Robbie could explain a couple things about signal towers to me in a bath, but on the whole, it’s a strong third-film from Johnson that puts some pep and vigour back into mainstream English-Canadian cinema not directed by a guy called Cronenberg. This should’ve opened the Berlinale.