BlackBerry review: one of 2023's best movies so far – Digital Trends
“Director Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry is a lean and engrossing rise-and-fall drama that at the moment ranks as one of many 12 months’s finest movies.”
- Matt Johnson’s assured, assured path
- A trio of compelling lead performances
- A sophisticated story that is made simply digestible
- A 3rd-act that pulls its punches only a bit an excessive amount of
BlackBerry tells a well-recognized story. The brand new movie from Operation Avalanche director Matt Johnson is, in some ways, a traditional rise-and-fall drama in the identical vein as American epics like The Social Community and — to a a lot lesser extent — Goodfellas. Its gamers are acquainted archetypes and, over the course of BlackBerry’s two-hour runtime, they fill their roles effectively. The movie’s script, in the meantime, which was penned by Johnson and Matthew Miller, charts its objectively complicated company story in as streamlined and easy a manner as attainable.
Not like The Social Community, although, BlackBerry doesn’t attempt to make any particular factors concerning the present state of American society. Its themes of reckless ambition and the corrosive nature of greed are timeless and, very similar to the remainder of BlackBerry, acquainted to anybody who has seen a movie prefer it earlier than. Nonetheless, regardless of boasting far more modest intentions than lots of its non secular predecessors, BlackBerry is constructed with a degree of confidence and precision that makes it one of many higher films of the 12 months thus far.
Spanning roughly 20 years, BlackBerry begins within the mid-Nineteen Nineties when a pair of lifelong mates, Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson), determine to satisfy with an formidable company shark, Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), to current their pitch for a telephone that may connect with the web and obtain and ship emails. Jim, within the wake of shedding a job because of his personal vanity, gives to assist Doug and Mike pitch and promote their telephone on the situation that he be named one of many CEOs of their Canada-based tech firm and awarded a substantial proportion of the enterprise itself. Mike, determined to stand up by means of the tech world’s ranks, accepts Jim’s supply.
Within the years that observe, Jim, Mike, and Doug handle to show their system, the BlackBerry, into one of the in style and necessary merchandise on the planet. Alongside the way in which, Doug is compelled to face by and watch as Mike turns into increasingly snug within the company world that they’d beforehand strived to not get sucked in by. Their success is, in fact, inevitably challenged by the late-2000s emergence of opponents like Apple and Android, whose units have the potential to oust BlackBerry from the world’s telephone market altogether.
These aware of BlackBerry’s story will already understand how all the pieces finally ends for Mike, Doug, and Jim. Johnson’s movie, to its credit score, doesn’t attempt to conceal or shock viewers with BlackBerry’s inevitable issues. His and Miller’s script, as an alternative, plainly crops the seeds for the corporate’s third-act flip, and it’s a testomony to the deftness of BlackBerry‘s storytelling that the downfall of the eponymous enterprise appears like the results of choices made by its characters relatively than shifts out there that have been merely out of their management.
On-screen, Howerton, Johnson, and Baruchel create a trio of conflicting, distinct personalities. As Balsillie, Howerton is a always overflowing bucket of rage and vanity, which makes him a singular counter to Baruchel’s conflict-averse, however quietly crafty Lazaridis. In-between them, Johnson emerges as the center and soul of BlackBerry. His Doug Fregin is a red-headband-clad film nerd who’s characterised as an anticorporate slacker for a lot of the movie, solely to later be revealed to be far wiser concerning the complicated nature of office politics than he lets on. Johnson, for his half, imbues the character’s latter flip with sufficient empathy to render it plausible.
Outdoors of its core trio, BlackBerry establishes a revolving door of memorable supporting characters, together with Paul Stannos (Wealthy Sommer) and Ritchie Cheung (SungWon Cho), a pair of completed engineers who get poached from their respective corporations by Howerton’s Balsillie. Because the boastful head of a rival telephone firm that’s interested by taking up BlackBerry, Cary Elwes chews up the surroundings and steals one memorable second-act scene, whereas Saul Rubinek elevates a number of key moments because the spokesperson for BlackBerry’s largest provider associate. Altogether, these actors assist flesh out the movie’s in any other case stale world of company places of work and personal planes.
Regardless of BlackBerry‘s formidable dimension and scope, editor Curt Lobb additionally ensures that the movie strikes at a constantly quick clip from the second it begins to the second it ends. The movie speeds by means of its story — correctly counting on a handful of well-placed needle drops to transition between its three key time durations — with out ever introducing its characters and necessary plot beats too rapidly to permit BlackBerry to devolve right into a complicated mess. In that sense, the movie tonally and narratively resembles 2015’s The Huge Quick extra carefully than it does every other. Each films, notably, succeed at rendering a staggering quantity of company jargon simply accessible, which is a feat that’s simpler stated than completed.
BlackBerry’s connections to The Huge Quick don’t cease and finish with its plot. Visually, Johnson adopts the identical type of quasi-documentary fashion for BlackBerry as its Adam McKay-directed predecessor. The movie’s aesthetic, happily, elevates its Nineteen Nineties, analog origins, whereas Johnson’s slick, fast-paced directorial fashion works effectively with BlackBerry’s editorial tempo and on-screen story. The movie’s best accomplishment, in different phrases, is simply how artistically cohesive and guaranteed it feels. In the end, it’s the boldness that Johnson brings to BlackBerry that enables it to enter the identical thematic and narrative enviornment as a number of the best movies within the historical past of American cinema.
The movie, in fact, doesn’t fairly attain the identical heights as lots of the classics which have come earlier than it. In its third act, BlackBerry pulls its punches only a bit an excessive amount of — letting its characters off the hook for errors which might be far too disastrous to justify the comparatively gentle therapy they’re given. And as compelling because the story of BlackBerry’s rise and fall is, the corporate’s loss of life by the hands of Apple and others doesn’t finally maintain as a lot international weight as a number of the different rise-and-fall tales which have been realized on-screen earlier than.
However even when BlackBerry doesn’t hit fairly onerous sufficient to be thought of an prompt traditional, it nonetheless makes a substantial influence. For its director, the movie not solely marks a brand new inventive excessive, but additionally proclaims Johnson as a filmmaker value paying nearer consideration to within the years to return. His newest is a movie that, in contrast to its protagonists, makes almost all the correct calls.
BlackBerry is now enjoying in theaters.
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