‘BlackBerry’ Review: Energetic Comedy/Drama Details the Smartphone Legend’s Rise and Fall
The entrance and exit of the BlackBerry smartphone is truly an all-thumbs tale – that of a beloved keyboard on a game-changing wireless device, and a Canadian company (Research in Motion) not terribly dexterous with innovation after the market pie went from “CrackBerry”-flavored to Apple-forward.Equal parts high-tension business saga and nerd comedy, Matt Johnson’s feature “BlackBerry” – adapted with co-writer Matthew Miller from a book about the phone’s meteoric life (“Losing the Signal”) — parses the origins of the device’s success and the seeds of its downfall. Naturally, the story is bracketed by scrappy sorcery on one end and Steve Jobs’ competition-destroying genius on the other, but at its heart is the strange-bedfellows relationship between soft-spoken engineer Mike Laziridis (a silver-haired Jay Baruchel) and his shrewd, take-no-prisoners co-CEO Jim Balsillie (a bald, scarily fulminous Glenn Howerton).The result, at a well-paced but unnecessarily long two hours, is a seriocomic cautionary tale of butting personalities in a fast-changing world, told in a low-key, off-the-cuff observational style closer to mockumentary than recent tech-bio approaches like the flashy moral-monologuing of Sorkin (“The Social Network,” “Steve Jobs”) or the Shakespearean heft of “The Dropout.”Maybe that’s the wry Canadian sensibility in Toronto-based Johnson and Miller, whose previous two movies (“The Dirties,” “Operation Avalanche”) were found-footage larks about the thrills and perils of collaboration.