‘You want to be great, you need to sacrifice. The more painful the sacrifice, the greater you’ll be...’
Ben Affleck’s Air is a great film about the rise of a company. BlackBerry is also a great film about the rise of a company. What the latter has that the former doesn’t is what happens when that company crashes and burns. Goodfellas is so effective because we witness Henry Hill’s downfall as well as his meteoric rise. In this aspect, and it feels natural to compare the two as they both came out in 2023 and both feature similar subject matter, BlackBerry perhaps just has the edge over Air…
Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) has a dream. A phone that can also send emails. The problem is that Mike and his partner Doug (Matt Johnson – who also directs) are not businessmen. They are tech guys. To that end, and with few other options available to them, Mike and Doug bring in Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) to shore up the business end. Despite incredible initial success, Mike and Jim eventually succumb to hubris and corruption in the shadow of the introduction of the iPhone.
Johnson gets everything right here (a sentence that has never been uttered about me). The two leads are perfectly cast with Baruchel excelling at playing both sides of the Mike Lazaridis coin – shy boy genius and delusional narcissist. Howerton manages to spend most of the film being absolutely furious without his performance becoming too Dennis Reynolds-esque. The screenplay, from Johnson as well as Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff is smart, funny and engaging. The contemporaneous needle drops help to ground the film in the appropriate time period. Basically, this film takes the best bits of Silicon Valley and The Social Network and combines them to create something fresh and innovative.
BlackBerry, like Air, is one of those films that absolutely everyone will enjoy. It has something for all. One of the best corporate biopics ever made.