2023 is proving to be the year of the biopic. While each year produces at least a couple of well-produced and well-marketed movies about the dramatization of a particular person’s life (or people), 2023 has more than usual. It is a trend I see continuing into future years. With films about Michael Jordan (Air), George Foreman (Big George Foreman), J. Robert Oppenheimer (Oppenheimer), Emily Brontë (Emily), Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (Chevalier), Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon), Henk Rogers (Tetris), Richard Montañez (Flamin Hot), Leonard Bernstein (Maestro), Ronald Reagan (Reagan), there is no shortage as to what’s on the table for someone in Hollywood to take a stab at. The much-anticipated Tetris felt like it would be the most significant “technology” biopic of the bench. However, I felt the film to be underwhelming and wildly ambitious (the KGB?) for a movie marketed to be about a universally cherished video game, but it often felt like it was anything except.
It felt ironic that just two months later, a film about the meteoric rise and fall of, as many people saw it, the world’s first smartphone. Well before its release, it felt like Matt Johnson’s Blackberry was destined for the same failure as the device it portrayed. Before viewing, I had heard that the film was dramatic, comedic, satirical, tense, intense, intelligent, entertaining, and educational. But I neither heard nor read anyone say that it was terrible. Skeptical at first, Blackberry delivered on all fronts. And, while I didn’t necessarily find it funny or have as much satire as others may have, I agree with the above adjectives used to describe the film.
The film stars Jay Baruchel (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, FXX’s Man Seeking Woman) as Mike, the awkward genius behind BlackBerry Limited, known as Research In Motion (RIM), until January 2013. With Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson, doubling as director and supporting actor), his free-spirited friend from their childhood, the duo invented a pocket-sized phone that could send emails and texts and act as a pager. What separated BlackBerry from its predecessors and successors was its fully QWERTY keyboard.
I read somewhere that this film (paraphrasing) feels like it was shot in NBC’s The Office’s documentary crew style, rich with tones from the always-looking-out-for-number-one, backstabbing nature of HBO’s Succession, mixed in with educational yet engaging storytelling elements of The Social Network. This is a perfect way to describe BlackBerry, a film that isn’t quite sure if it wants to be a drama or a comedy. This often can lead to disaster. Johnson makes it work and allows it to define his movie, bringing in audiences, such as myself, who might otherwise have chosen to skip it.
While BlackBerry is a fictionalized version of actual events, it is “based on a true story” rather than “inspired by true events.” As I’ve learned the hard way, there can be a vast difference between the two. Many of the characters and situations were elaborated upon for audience entertainment, including timelines. Certain events that may have been greeted with much doubt were instead made to look like visionary revelations, mainly how effortlessly their mocked-up prototypes came together, how quickly they were able to fix bugs just in the nick of time, and how little supporting evidence they had to back up their claims that their revolutionary combination of cellphone, email device, and pager invention could forever change the landscape. However, as unlikely as their story was, its meteoric rise and fall captivated so many in the late 1990s and early 2000s
Plot 9/10
Character Development 9.5/10
Character Chemistry 8/10
Acting 8/10
Screenplay 9/10
Directing 9/10
Cinematography 10/10
Sound 9/10
Hook and Reel 9.5/10
Universal Relevance 8/10 (would have been a 10/10 if fewer of the details were fictionalized, for the sake of entertainment)
90%
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