BlackBerry - 2023 film review

I can remember quite vividly a partners' meeting that I attended, perhaps twenty years ago, when a corporate lawyer in my firm waxed lyrical about the virtues of the BlackBerry device. At that time, BlackBerries were much in vogue, and before long we all had one for work use. It seemed so cutting edge...but of course, with technology, the cutting edge soon gets very blunt indeed.

BlackBerry is a 2023 Canadian film, co-written by Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller, and directed by Johnson, which charts the rise and fall of the company that made the device. It told me quite a bit I didn't know (although of course, the story has no doubt been significantly adjusted to make it more entertaining) and gave me no reason whatsoever to reconsider my instinctive wariness of tech barons.

The story begins twenty years ago. Two boffins who run a company called Research in Motion, Mike Lazarides and Douglas Fregin (played by Jay Baruchel and Matt Johnson himself) pitch a new device which attracts the interest of a hard-nosed businessman, Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). He puts some money into the company and before long, despite a chaotic approach reflected in the cinematography, they come up with the BlackBerry and starting raking in zillions.

All goes well until the arrival of the iPhone. The success story starts to unravel and things go from bad to worse once the authorities start looking into some dodgy stock options. The weakness of the film is that we don't get much insight into the outside lives of the key players. When you're telling a story about living people who aren't short of money, you have to be very careful. But as light entertainment, BlackBerry works fairly well. And I found it almost nostalgic viewing - it's a very long time since my own BlackBerry went to the scrap heap...