I lived through the rise and fall of BlackBerry but, not being an early adopter, it barely touched my life.

Matt Johnson directs (and plays goofy co-founder Doug) and launches us into a mockumentary style depiction of the early days of BlackBerry that inexorably becomes a sobering tale of the fickleness of consumerism.

Mike (Jay Baruchel) is the soft-spoken, bumbling, CEO of RIM, Research in Motion, and the brains behind their rather disheveled operations. They have an office full of geeks, building modems for a dubious $16 million contract while playing video games and hanging out for the weekly movie night.

Doug is the emotional heart of the company’s feelgood culture, but feels his influence waning when corporate shark Jim (a delightfully odious Glenn Howerton) comes on board. He sees the potential of their ‘phone that can also email’ and it is his immoral and dubiously legal strategies that turn RIM and BlackBerry into a tech giant.

It’s fascinating to see what made them great, and what caused their fall. It’s tempting to feel smug from the future, particularly when a desperate Mike exhorts that iPhones will fail to make a dent in their market. Like in Time Bomb Y2K (2023), we see Steve Jobs pre-turtleneck and people just like us starting on the slippery slope to information addiction.

I’m sure there is some poetic license taken, for example, the name seemingly didn’t come about as depicted and was more boringly devised by a marketing team, but Johnson’s treatment is so light that we don’t really mind. He does a good job of turning up the seriousness so slowly that we don’t notice the film has gone from comedy to a parable about the pitfalls of greedy capitalism.

And I would have given it an extra half a star but it failed the Bechdel Test as if there weren’t women around back then.

Director: Matt Johnson
Origin: Canada (2023)
Language: English

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