In-between them, Johnson emerges as the heart and soul of BlackBerry. As Balsillie, Howerton is a constantly overflowing bucket of rage and arrogance, which makes him a unique counter to Baruchel’s conflict-averse, but quietly cunning Lazaridis. On-screen, Howerton, Johnson, and Baruchel create a trio of conflicting, distinct personalities. His and Miller’s script, instead, plainly plants the seeds for the company’s third-act turn, and it’s a testament to the deftness of BlackBerry‘s storytelling that the downfall of the eponymous business feels like the result of decisions made by its characters rather than shifts in the market that were simply out of their control. Johnson’s film, to its credit, doesn’t try to hide or surprise viewers with BlackBerry’s inevitable problems. Those familiar with BlackBerry’s story will already know how everything ultimately ends for Mike, Doug, and Jim. Their success is, of course, inevitably challenged by the late-2000s emergence of competitors like Apple and Android, whose devices have the potential to oust BlackBerry from the world’s phone market altogether. Along the way, Doug is forced to stand by and watch as Mike becomes more and more comfortable in the corporate world that they had previously strived not to get sucked in by. In the years that follow, Jim, Mike, and Doug manage to turn their device, the BlackBerry, into one of the most popular and important products in the world. Mike, desperate to rise up through the tech world’s ranks, accepts Jim’s offer. Jim, in the wake of losing a job due to his own arrogance, offers to help Doug and Mike pitch and sell their phone on the condition that he be named one of the CEOs of their Canada-based tech company and awarded a considerable percentage of the business itself. Spanning roughly 20 years, BlackBerry begins in the mid-1990s when a pair of lifelong friends, Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson), decide to meet with an ambitious corporate shark, Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), to present their pitch for a phone that can connect to the internet and receive and send emails. However, despite boasting much more modest intentions than many of its spiritual predecessors, BlackBerry is built with a level of confidence and precision that makes it one of the better movies of the year so far. Its themes of reckless ambition and the corrosive nature of greed are timeless and, much like the rest of BlackBerry, familiar to anyone who has seen a film like it before. Unlike The Social Network, though, BlackBerry doesn’t try to make any specific points about the current state of American society. The film’s script, meanwhile, which was penned by Johnson and Matthew Miller, charts its objectively complex corporate story in as streamlined and straightforward a way as possible. Its players are familiar archetypes and, over the course of BlackBerry’s two-hour runtime, they fill their roles well. The new film from Operation Avalanche director Matt Johnson is, in many ways, a classic rise-and-fall drama in the same vein as American epics like The Social Network and - to a much lesser extent - Goodfellas. OnwardMobility’s intended device apparently took a lot of cues from 2015’sīlackBerry Priv the last phone BlackBerry itself made and also the first BlackBerry to run Android.A third-act that pulls its punches just a bit too muchīlackBerry tells a familiar story. The KeyOne, in particular, runs pretty slow today and was not well future-proofed. 5G phones don’t need to tout the latest, most powerful Snapdragon chipsets but it could’ve helped the new BlackBerry garner more staying power with buyers. “Feature-rich” perhaps means that the new BlackBerry was meant to be an all-singing, all-dancing high-end device, unlike the KeyOne or Key2. Over the past few years the company had been busy shedding its mobile patent portfolio, withĩ0 sold to Huawei as of mid-2021, though admittedly that’s a drop in the ocean compared to the purported total haul of 38,000 patents it was at one point in possession of. While the cancellation of OnwardMobility license was something of a surprising in this latest saga, the preceding trend of BlackBerry selling off its catalogue of patents was nothing new.
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