When did you start taking your smartphone for granted?
When did having the once-unfathomable computer power formerly reserved for rooms full of hardware at an IBM facility fit into your pocket become expected? Ho-hum, even?
Probably a few years after BlackBerry exploded. The once near-ubiquitous device was designed as a “pager, a cellphone and an email machine all in one,” one of the people who helped create it says in the gripping, exciting and kind of sad “BlackBerry,” a film about the rise and fall of what at the time seemed like a sci-fi miracle come to life.
And if that description sounds quaint, just wait for the real-life footage co-writer and director Matt Johnson slips into the film of Oprah Winfrey introducing it to her amped-up TV audience. They freak out. But the BlackBerry fell even faster than it rose, dashing friendships and futures along the way.
If you can count cashing out for millions and even billions of dollars a dashed future, I suppose. But it still must gnaw at Mike Lazaridis, who created the BlackBerry, every time he sees someone use an iPhone. Or uses one himself, maybe.
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What is ‘BlackBerry’ about?
Jay Baruchel plays Mike as the prototypical driven genius, so hyper-focused on details that minutes before the biggest meeting of his life, in 1996, he has to rewire an intercom speaker because its humming distracts him.
Mike attends this meeting with Doug Fregin, played by Johnson, a headband-wearing nerd who lives for Movie Night at Research in Motion, the company he and Mike founded. It’s nerd heaven, with staff morale outpacing earnings by a long distance.
The meeting goes poorly when Jim Balsillie (an unrecognizable Glenn Howerton) shoots down the duo’s idea for what we’d think of now as a smartphone. Jim is, to put it bluntly, a jerk, who finds himself fired soon after and offers to join Research in Motion for 50% of the company and the insistence that he be CEO.
That doesn’t quite happen, but Jim does become co-CEO, along with Mike. Jim is hard-charging, the tech type who demands some impossible-to-produce prototype land on his desk by Friday. Howerton leans into every bit of Jim’s repugnant personality.
Yet, as often seems to be the case, Jim is also what the company needs. He pushes Mike and Doug, though it’s Mike who lands their first big client almost by mistake. But he’s got the goods, and the BlackBerry would not only take over the world, it would revolutionize it.
Jim, naturally, oversells it, crashing servers as his obsession with buying an NHL team distracts him. Meanwhile, he’s poaching Google engineers to the tune of $10 million, backdating stock options — a practice that is generally frowned upon by the Securities and Exchange Commission, with whom he will run afoul eventually.
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Does BlackBerry still exist?
While arrogance certainly played a part in BlackBerry’s collapse, it’s what happened in 2007 that Doug pulls Mike out of a meeting to watch that really did it in: Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone. An employee predicts that the new Apple device will change history’s perception of the BlackBerry to “what people had before they got iPhones.”
Bingo.
In many ways “BlackBerry” is the standard-fare cautionary tale of tech start-ups. Insert your Icarus metaphors here. But there is a kind of sweetness to the film that makes it more compelling than the typical rise, crash and burn movie.
Mike and Doug grow apart, with Mike’s ambition clouding their relationship. Things go really sour when Jim, without asking anyone, as is his habit, hires a fire-breathing chief operating officer (Michael Ironside) who clamps down on office fun, going so far as to, gasp, cancel movie night.
All of the performances are excellent, but Howerton’s commitment to his portrayal of Jim is ruthless and uncompromising. He just never lets up, somehow manages to fight off any glimpse of humanity the guy might have had.
It’s awesome. So is “BlackBerry,” a look at a world that wasn’t that long ago, but seems like eons.
‘BlackBerry’ 4 stars
Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★
Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★
Director: Matt Johnson.
Cast: Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, Matt Johnson.
Rating: R for language throughout.
How to watch: In theaters Friday, May 12.
Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: @goodyk.
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