Corporate intrigue films can be challenging cause they have to weave the narrative that is based on numbers and abstractions often spread out over significant amounts of time, and pace it like an action movie ensuring the audience comprehends the stakes. The effective ones make everything feel life and death. Writer/director/star Johnson manages to pull this off with his docudrama style film, a mash up of comedy and drama, BlackBerry, that is gripping and entertaining from the first frames.
The tale of Research in Motion's rise and fall has all the classic elements of these sorts of drama and is rich for the dramatization. There's a great cast here but Howerton for me was the standout, playing unlikeable well and even walking a fine line between hero and villain without ever fully falling into the later category. I found myself reflecting on how riveting the. movie was despite the ending being rather anti-climactic... I mean all our protagonists remained out of jail and remained millionaires. I mean even the company whose "decline" this follows remains a profitable company. While the story follows how we all went from having BlackBerries to having iPhones, the stakes here, for the personas we are following, end up feeling more dramatic than they are. Perhaps that is some of the strength of the film.
BlackBerry is a fun film that will make you want to talk about it after. It's recent history feeling leads to this cause much of the audience will be remembering where they were when, which of the phones they had, and feel even more pulled in to the story. But even without that Johnson has infused a fantastic energy into his story that makes it all so much more involving than it should be.
BlackBerry
Starring: Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, Cary Elwes, Saul Rubinek, Michael Ironside, Rich Sommer, SungWon Cho, Michelle Giroux, Matt Johnson
Director: Matt Johnson
Writers: Matthew Miller, Matt Johnson
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