movie reviews for blackberry

“BlackBerry” is a MoneyBro movie par excellence, right up there with “ Wall Street ,” “ Glengarry Glen Ross ,” “ Boiler Room ,” and “ The Wolf of Wall Street .” It shares their key, defining trait: even though its main characters are either charismatic sociopaths or sheep, and the capitalist system they operate in is deeply corrupt and rewards men without morals or conscience, the story is so excitingly told, the performances so watchable, and the dialogue so quotable that it becomes the verbal equivalent of an action flick—kinetic, suspenseful, and sometimes unexpectedly beautiful and weirdly moving. Instead of shooting, stabbing, or beating each other, or chasing each other in vehicles, characters in MoneyBro cinema insult each other, construct elaborate traps that play on insider knowledge or exploit an opponent’s weaknesses and pathologies, score vindicating promotions and huge paydays, and try to see how long they can keep a streak going before someone slaps handcuffs on them. I’ve seen colleagues insist that “BlackBerry” should be shown in business school classes as a cautionary tale, but it’s easier to imagine a group of young guys in ties putting it on after a long night of carousing and reciting the dialogue together until they pass out. It’s one of the coolest portrayals of losers doomed to be historical footnotes that you’ll ever see, with a needle-drop soundtrack so cannily chosen that every song on it will probably be used in a commercial for a Fortune 500 company within the next two years.

Directed and co-starring Matt Johnson and inspired by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff ’s business history, Losing the Signal , “BlackBerry” is shot in a raggedy, trembling handheld style that suggests what an episode of “The Office” guest-scripted by David Mamet might have felt like. The most fascinating thing about the script, co-written by Johnson and Matthew Miller , is its structure. It shows us the beginning and end of this story but nothing else. The ellipsis in the middle gives the film a more intriguing energy than it would have had than if it had followed the standard playbook of meticulously tracking the rise and fall of a product and its makers. Imagine watching only the first and last episodes of an excellent TV drama—or the MoneyBro equivalent of “ Full Metal Jacket ,” the only war film that shows naive recruits being trained/brainwashed at the beginning of the process and their cynical, hardened-by-war, final incarnations, but skips the middle part showing how the change happened.

The BlackBerry, of course, was the handheld device that the iPhone and its imitators wiped out of the marketplace. Part one of the movie shows how Mike Lazaridis ( Jay Baruchel ) and his partner Douglas Fregin (Johnson) created the BlackBerry and figured out how to let huge numbers of them operate on the same cellular network without crashing the system, then watched as its popularity spread, putting them on the verge of becoming tech icons in the mold of Steve Jobs .

Like many creative geniuses, Mike and Doug lack the ruthlessness and nuts-and-bolts knowledge they need to survive and thrive in a capitalist system. They’re nerds habitually bullied by their clients, including one who owes them millions for products they already shipped and has been stringing them along for months. Enter Jim Ballsillie ( Glenn Howerton ), a domineering executive and hockey buff who feels unappreciated at his current job. He senses that the duo is on the verge of something big and offers to make their problems disappear and grow the company if they make him CEO. Doug sizes Jim up as a “shark” and is justifiably terrified of him. But Mike, who stammers and cringes his way through any call asking for money, makes Jim “co-CEO.” He thinks there’s value in hiring someone who can strike fear in the heart of anyone who might try to take advantage of them, and knows how to sense when an important moment is imminent and seize it. “You know who’s afraid of sharks? Pirates,” Mike says.

The movie sprints through the company’s rise, compressing a lot of the story into lively montages shot in the style of a Steven Soderbergh heist film (or business procedural like his “ High Flying Bird ” or “The Informant!”), often leaning into the innate ridiculousness of a scenario. (When Jim orders everyone at the company to become “male models” and be seen in public using BlackBerries no matter what activity they’re engaged in, the film cuts to a man playing tennis one-handed while using his free hand to hold a device.) There’s suspense that centers on whether the exponential increase in BlackBerry sales will overload their wireless carrier’s system and render their product unusable; the solution is ingenious.

There’s an implied breakpoint around the middle of the movie, and then we pick up in the mid-aughts when BlackBerry is about to get memory-holed by the same era that it did so much to define. This all plays out in a way that evokes Heraclitus’s belief that character is destiny. There are no surprises, really, in how everything goes. All the key players in the story behave more or less as they behaved when we met them, but the circumstances are different, and they’ve gotten complacent and myopic and are reluctant to bend and change.

“BlackBerry” pays close attention to the details of what happened and explains important moments without being pedantic. At the same time, it treats the characters and events as elements in an art object. It’s fun to re-watch and study in hopes of noticing subtle details that escaped one’s attention the first time and draw connections between the halves. In one of Mike’s earliest personality-defining scenes, Jim tries to push him into throwing together a prototype in less time than he thinks he needs to do it properly, and Mike pushes back. Later in the film, he gives in, with terrible results. Similarly, Jim’s macho, improvisational, blustery, “If I can dream it, I can make it happen” energy that powers the company’s early success blows up in his face later. Even his fascination with hockey becomes an element in the company’s fall.

It might be instructive to superimpose the first and second parts of the film over each other to see if certain scenes map perfectly over other scenes. I suspect it would all fit as snugly as the key setpieces in the first and second “ Star Wars ” trilogies, which are also about how the seeds of a person’s triumph or downfall are planted early in the story of their life. Many of this film’s adults seem like overgrown children more often than not. Mike loves the click-click sound of the BlackBerry’s buttons so much that when the innovation of the screen-only iPhone threatens to eradicate the product, his brain has a brown-out, and when it comes back online, he’s malfunctioning. All he can do is deny the obvious.

Baruchel rose to fame playing a smart, sensitive, easily flustered teenager on TV’s “Undeclared”—what a deep bench of storytellers the Judd Apatow / Paul Feig factory produced!—and he channels some of that performance here, too, even though he’s 41 now and has dyed his hair silver to match the real Mike. He and Johnson are believable as men who have known each other a long time but have only limited influence over each other’s major decisions, especially the bad ones.

Howerton assures himself a spot on any future list of classic scene-stealing jerks: with his shaved-bald head, narrowed eyes, and pouty lips, he’s the greatest supporting character that the young Bruce Willis never got to play. All three actors capture a quality that defined the ‘90s and aughts in both technology and finance—a self-flattering need to affect some “warrior spirit” and revel in the spectacle of destroying one’s enemies financially and virtually as if a village had been sacked and burned rather than a signature added to a document. As in satires like “ American Psycho ,” the behavior is appallingly funny, and funny because it’s appalling. This movie is about people whose successes and failures originate in the same place: a tragedy shot and edited like an action comedy.

In theaters now.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis
Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie
Matt Johnson as Doug
Michael Ironside as Purdy
Rich Sommer as Paul
Cary Elwes as Yankowski
Saul Rubinek as Woodman
Martin Donovan as
SungWon Cho as Ritchie
Michelle Giroux as Dara
Mark Critch as Bettman
Ben Petrie as Allan
Ethan Eng as Ethan

Writer (based on the book by)

Jacquie McNish
Sean Silcoff

Cinematographer

Jay McCarrol
Matt Johnson
Matthew Miller

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‘BlackBerry’ Review: Big Dreams, Little Keyboards

The struggle to sell a revolutionary gizmo fractures a friendship in this lively, bittersweet comedy.

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A man with gray hair stands looking down at a device while a group of men cheer in the background.

By Jeannette Catsoulis

In Matt Johnson’s “BlackBerry” — a wonky workplace comedy that slowly shades into tragedy — the emergence of the smartphone isn’t greeted with fizzing fireworks and popping champagne corks. Instead, Johnson and his co-writer, Matthew Miller (adapting Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s 2015 book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry” ), have fashioned a tale of scrabbling toward success that tempers its humor with an oddly moving wistfulness.

That blend of patter and pathos was also evident in Johnson’s previous feature, “Operation Avalanche” (2016) , as was an intrepid filming style that effortlessly conjures the rush of innovation. This time, we’re in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1996, where Mike Lazaridis (a perfect Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson) — best friends and co-founders of a small tech company called Research in Motion (RIM) — are trying to sell a product they call PocketLink, a revolutionary combination of cellphone, email device and pager. While waiting to pitch a roomful of suits, Mike is distracted by an annoyingly buzzing intercom. Grabbing a paper clip, he quickly fixes it, noting that it was made in China. Disgust flits across his face, an expression we will remember when, much later, mounting problems force him to embrace a manufacturing option he despises.

Clever callbacks like this allow “BlackBerry” to hauntingly connect the story’s downward slide with the innocence and optimism of its early scenes. The corporate types don’t understand Mike and Doug’s invention, but a predatory salesman named Jim Balsillie (a fantastic Glenn Howerton), gets it. Recently fired and fired up, Jim sees the device’s potential, making a deal to acquire part of RIM in exchange for cash and expertise. Doug, a man-child invariably accessorized with a headband and a bewildered look, is doubtful; Mike, assisted by a shock of prematurely gray hair, is wiser. He knows that they’ll need an intermediary to succeed.

Reveling in a vibe — hopeful, testy, undisciplined — that’s an ideal match for its subject, “BlackBerry” finds much of its humor in Jim’s resolve to fashion productive employees from RIM’s ebulliently geeky staff, who look and act like middle schoolers and converse in a hybrid of tech-speak and movie quotes. It’s all Vogon poetry to Jim; but as Jared Raab’s restless camera careens around the chaotic work space, the excitement of disruption and the thrill of creation become tangible. It helps that the director is more than familiar with the feel of a friend-filled workplace: It’s how he’s been making movies since his first feature, “The Dirties,” in 2013.

Fortified with strong actors in small roles — Michael Ironside as a pit bull C.O.O., Martin Donovan as the boss who sees the peril in Jim’s ruthlessness — “BlackBerry” remains grounded when the money rolls in and übergeeks from Google are enticed by multimillion-dollar offers. Some of the financial machinations, like Jim’s frantic attempts to fend off a hostile takeover by Palm Pilot, are less than clear; but “BlackBerry” isn’t just the story of a life-altering gadget. Long before that gadget’s death knell sounds in the unveiling of the iPhone, Jim has so thoroughly insinuated himself between the two friends that an image of a forgotten Doug, gazing down from a window as Jim and Mike head off to a meeting, is almost heartbreaking.

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BlackBerry Is a Movie That Portrays Tech Dreams Honestly—Finally

Jay Baruchel as “Mike Lazaridis” and Matt Johnson as “Doug” in Matt Johnsons BlackBerry

It’s quaint, looking back on it now, but in the decade before iPhones , Androids , and Samsung Galaxies , BlackBerry was the smartphone. It was dubbed the “CrackBerry,” because of the seemingly addictive hold the sleek gizmo, with its satisfyingly clicky keyboard buttons, had on the market. Kim Kardashian was glued to hers. Barack Obama ran the free world from his. And its famously secure messaging client helped international drug rings conduct businesses across the globe.

Now, it’s a relic. An also-ran. Or, as one character puts it in BlackBerry , a new movie about the early smartphone empire’s rise and fall, it’s merely “the thing people used before they used the iPhone.” But as this fresh, thoughtful comedy makes plain, BlackBerry is more than just a bleak cautionary tale. It’s a story of how tech culture, as we know it today, took root, bloomed, and died on the vine.

The movie opens with a telling title card: “The following fictionalization is inspired by real people and real events that took place in Waterloo, Ontario.” Matt Johnson, the film’s director and cowriter, shrugs it off as “a prefix designed by our lawyers.” But beyond ensuring artistic license, it also situates the film, squarely, in a sleepy town about an hour and half from Toronto.

Before the super successful BlackBerry and its parent company, Research in Motion, revamped the region as an aspiring tech hub, Waterloo and its environs were better known for their lively farmer’s market culture and Mennonites in horse-drawn buggies.

What BlackBerry captures is the period that disrupted that, a short-lived rumpsringa in the late '90s and early aughts when the future of tech and telecommunications felt truly global. It was a period when anywhere could be the next Silicon Valley. In this sense, the titular gadget—which promised palm-of-your-hand connectivity across the globe—is, quite literally, a structuring device.

Loosely based on the 2016 book Losing the Signal , BlackBerry seems at first blush like a familiar, Social Network -style drama of a company’s explosive rise. Nebbish engineer Mike Lazaridis ( This Is the End ’s Jay Baruchel) teams up with Jim Balsillie ( It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia ’s Glenn Howerton), a menacing Harvard MBA. It’s a marriage of mutual convenience, undergirded by a more Faustian logic.

With Lazaridis’ ability to exploit existing wireless infrastructure, and Balsillie’s command of boardroom politics, the pair invent, and cannily market, the modern smartphone. In one funny montage, Howerton’s Balsillie recasts his sales force (“Dead-eyed dumb fucks,” as he calls them) as actors, dispatching them to fancy restaurants and private clubs to talk loudly on their BlackBerrys, in an effort to call attention to the device. “It’s not a cell phone,” he insists. “It’s a status symbol.”

Where Balsillie is eager to exploit the device’s appeal to a class of go-go C-suite dicks—and backdate employment contracts, and play cat-and-mouse with the SEC, and generally overpromise and underdeliver—Lazaridis is more preoccupied with the nuts-and-bolts of obsessively engineering a worthwhile product. His motto: “‘Good enough’ is the enemy of humanity.” For Baruchel (who, with great reluctance, relinquished his own vintage BlackBerry just two years ago), the film is a parable, warning about what happens “when you get so big that you’re beholden to other masters.”

If Balsillie (“ Ballsley, not Ball-silly ,” he seethes) is the corporate devil on Lazaridis’ shoulder, the better, or at least geekier, angels of his nature are represented by longtime friend and cofounder, Doug Fregin. As imagined (and played by) Johnson, Doug is a hyperactive goober in wide, windshield eyeglasses and a David Foster Wallace headband. He compares Wi-Fi signals to the Force in Star Wars , pays for business lunches with cash pried out of a velcro Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wallet, and uses “ Glengarry Glen Ross ” as a verb.

For Johnson, pop culture is a kind of lingua franca. His cult web series turned Viceland sitcom Nirvanna the Band the Show , is riven with references and extended homages: to the Criterion Collection, Nintendo ’s Wii Shop Wednesday, the rollerblading sequence set to a Prodigy track in the 1995 film Hackers . But more than a pop encyclopedia, Johnson is also a deft prober of the nerd pathology. In his feature debut, 2013’s The Dirties , he plays an alienated high schooler avenging himself on his bullies by plotting a school shooting, under the auspice of making a student film about a school shooting. “School shooting comedy” is a tough sell. But Johnson committed to the premise with verve, humor, and considerable intelligence, revealing how certain dorky defense mechanisms (from pop culture obsessiveness to irony) can curdle into out-and-out psychopathy.

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In this movie, Johnson gives the pop culture geek a fairer, more forgiving, shake. He wanted to create what he calls “the anti- Big Bang Theory ,” referring to the wildly popular syndicated sitcom that he regards “detestable.” “It’s no coincidence,” he points out, “that the guys who invented the first tele-communicator were all Star Trek fanatics.”

BlackBerry ’s opening credits montage situates the device as part of a longer pop culture lineage, running from Star Trek to Blade Runner, Inspector Gadget , and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. The sequence draws a direct line from the pop culture obsessives of the past and the technologists of the present. As Johnson puts it, “I don’t think the nerds of the '90s get enough credit for inventing the future.”

BlackBerry foregrounds this industriousness. In an early, legitimately thrilling sequence, a group of pale, bespectacled engineers frantically jury-rig a smartphone prototype out of a calculator, a TV remote, a Nintendo Game Boy, and a vintage Speak & Spell. Waking up at his desk the next morning in a puddle of his own drool, Doug declares, “I had a dream we were rich.” And then, citing Dune , “And sometimes my dreams occur exactly as I dreamt them.”

But Doug’s dreams don’t materialize. Not exactly. However clever, these starry-eyed, far-sighted techies seem fatally outmatched by the realities of capital markets and corporate politicking. Balsillie sees the product foremost as a symbol of “total individualism … that fits in your fist. ” The seriousness he affords the company—his marketing savvy, creative accounting, and ability to berate his underlings into submission—soon reveals itself in due course as a liability.

While the CEOs push BlackBerry toward exponential growth, Johnson’s Doug is more concerned with holding on to the liberating, quasi-anarchic culture of tech innovation. As increasingly absurd deadlines loom, he makes a point of breaking for pizza parties, and emergency, in-office movie nights. (“They based Duke Nukem on this guy,” he chirps, pointing to Roddy Piper’s gun-toting wiseass in John Carpenter’s They Live. ) Balsillie, meanwhile, writes him off as “a goof.”

For Doug, the opportunity of making many billions of dollars does not have to run counter to a breezy atmosphere of innovation, experimentation, and goofing off. And BlackBerry is, tellingly, made in this same spirit.

Formally, BlackBerry is loose, almost improvisational. The camera roves, jitters, and pulls focus in an instant. The poppy humor and fly-on-the-wall, hyperrealist style combine in compelling ways. Imagine an Edgar Wright movie lensed like a Ken Loach film. The performances feel similarly off-the-cuff. When Howerton’s Balsillie attempts to intimidate a boardroom by howling, “I AM FROM WATERLOOOOOO! WHERE THE VAMPIRES HANG OUT!” the line feels snatched out of thin air.

“I like when things are moving, when things are a little chaotic, when things are slightly unpredictable” says Howerton. “I think it creates an environment where you can create something that feels very real. It doesn't feel so calculated.”

Baurchel calls Johnson’s process “organic.” He invites actors to go off-book, supplying their own reactions based on their understanding of the characters. Some in the company were less enthused by the free-form approach. Johnson recalls Mad Men alum Rich Sommer, playing a Google engineer poached to rebuild BlackBerry’s network infrastructure, becoming so exasperated with the lack of more explicit direction that he removed his microphone on-set. (The shot of Sommer mouthing wordlessly is used in the final cut, suggesting his character’s own confusion and helplessness.)

Despite being bigger-budgeted and more broadly appealing than, say, his mockumentary about a school shooter, BlackBerry still feels intimate. Johnson reunites with a gang of fellow collaborators: writers, producers, editors, cinematographers, and a motley batch of like-minded pals who have all worked together on a string of small-scale, run-and-gun projects. There’s even a nose-thumbing, stick-it-to-the-man attitude apparent in the production’s liberal embrace of fair use copyright laws, which permit them to use extended clips from Hollywood blockbusters like Raiders of the Lost Ark , without having to fork over hefty licensing fees.

This vaguely rebellious posture, and the value of cooperation, was Johnson’s way into BlackBerry . “The only reason I even thought this story was interesting was because I thought, oh, these guys are independent filmmakers,” he explains, “who all of a sudden get in bed with somebody who really does know how the business side of filmmaking works. And that makes major cultural changes to the way that they're going to work together as friends.”

In the age of crypto bros, fraudulent CEOs, VCs bankrolling dopey apps, and a general disillusionment with the maximally profitable, minimally inspiring realm of “innovation,” tech culture can be fairly accused of forsaking its self-professed ideals of collaboration and camaraderie. But Johnson’s keen to keep that flame alive. He has made a movie about Big Tech’s vices and vicissitudes with a team of longtime collaborators, and a cast comprised largely of Canadian character actors, recruited from his backyard.

BlackBerry, the company, may have grown too fast, lost its pluck. But BlackBerry, the movie, is a model of how to make something at scale, without having to do the same. BlackBerry plays like the comedy equivalent of the industrious dorks pulling an all-nighter in the garage, attempting to reengineer the world in their image.

To paraphrase an old Silicon Valley chestnut, when you move fast, things break. Move too fast, and those broken things become more valuable, and more irreparable. Or, as Research In Motion cofounder Douglas Fregin (or a “fictionalization” of him) puts it, while staring out at a bland, beige, soul-dead corporate office: “I finally understand that quote: ‘When you grow up, your heart dies.’ That’s from Breakfast Club. John Hughes.”

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A new film explains how the smartphone market slipped through BlackBerry's hands

Justin Chang

Jay Baruchel plays Research In Motion co-CEO Mike Lazaridis in the film BlackBerry. IFC Films hide caption

Jay Baruchel plays Research In Motion co-CEO Mike Lazaridis in the film BlackBerry.

Like a lot of people, I'm a longtime iPhone user — in fact, I used an iPhone to record this very review. But I still have a lingering fondness for my very first smartphone — a BlackBerry — which I was given for work back in 2006. I loved its squat, round shape, its built-in keyboard and even its arthritis-inflaming scroll wheel.

Of course, the BlackBerry is now no more . And the story of how it became the hottest personal handheld device on the market, only to get crushed by the iPhone, is told in smartly entertaining fashion in a new movie simply titled BlackBerry.

Briskly adapted from Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff's book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry , this is the latest of a few recent movies, including Tetris and Air , that show us the origins of game-changing new products. But unlike those earlier movies, BlackBerry is as much about failure as it is about success, which makes it perhaps the most interesting one of the bunch.

If you're clinging to an old BlackBerry, it will officially stop working on Jan. 4

It begins in 1996, when Research In Motion is just a small, scrappy company hawking modems in Waterloo, Ontario. Jay Baruchel plays Mike Lazaridis, a mild-mannered tech whiz who's the brains of the operation. His partner is a headband-wearing, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles -loving goofball named Douglas Fregin, played by Matt Johnson, who also co-wrote and directed the movie.

Johnson's script returns us to an era of VHS tapes and dial-up internet, when the mere idea of a phone that could handle emails — let alone games, music and other applications — was unimaginable. That's exactly the kind of product that Mike and Doug struggle to pitch to a sleazy investor named Jim Balsillie, played by a raging Glenn Howerton, from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia .

All Tech Considered

Saying goodbye to blackberry's iconic original keyboard.

Jim knows very little about tech but senses that the Research In Motion guys might be onto something, and he joins their ragtag operation and tries to whip their slackerish employees into shape. And so, after a crucial deal with Bell Atlantic, later to be known as Verizon, the BlackBerry is born. And it becomes such a hit, so addictive among users, that people start calling it the "CrackBerry."

The time frame shifts to the early 2000s, with Research In Motion now based in a slick new office, with a private jet at its disposal. But the mix of personalities is as volatile as ever — sometimes they gel, but more often they clash.

She left her 2007 iPhone in its box for over a decade. It just sold for $63K

Mike, as sweetly played by Baruchel, is now co-CEO, and he's still the shy-yet-stubborn perfectionist, forever tinkering with new improvements to the BlackBerry, and refusing to outsource the company's manufacturing operations to China. Jim, also co-CEO, is the Machiavellian dealmaker who pulls one outrageous stunt after another, whether he's poaching top designers from places like Google or trying to buy a National Hockey League team and move it to Ontario. That leaves Doug on the outside looking in, trying to boost staff morale with Raiders of the Lost Ark movie nights and maintain the geeky good vibes of the company he started years earlier.

As a director, Johnson captures all this in-house tension with an energetic handheld camera and a jagged editing style. He also makes heavy use of a pulsing synth score that's ideally suited to a tech industry continually in flux.

BlackBerry: If You Don't Survive, May You Rest In Peace

The movie doesn't entirely sustain that tension or sense of surprise to the finish; even if you don't know exactly how it all went down in real life, it's not hard to see where things are headed. Jim's creative accounting lands the company in hot water right around the time Apple is prepping the 2007 launch of its much-anticipated iPhone. That marks the beginning of the end, and it's fascinating to watch as BlackBerry goes into its downward spiral. It's a stinging reminder that success and failure often go together, hand in thumb-scrolling hand.

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‘BlackBerry’ Review: A Ferocious and Nearly Unrecognizable Glenn Howerton Steals This Rowdy Tech-World Satire

Director Matt Johnson re-creates the excitement that followed the invention of the first smartphone, amplifying the atmosphere of chaos that surrounds an industry run by brilliant but immature young men.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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For a hot minute, it looked like BlackBerry might control the smartphone market. They got there first, figuring out how to use the existing data network to put email in users’ hands. Sure, it all came packaged in a device as thick and unwieldy as a slice of French toast — too big for most people’s pockets, not at all comfortable to hold up to one’s ear. Still, Canada-based electronics company Research in Motion revolutionized how mobile phones worked and what they could do, making billionaires of its co-founders. So what happened?

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And then there’s “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” star Howerton, the MVP in an all-around terrific ensemble, who shaved the top of his head to play balding, no-nonsense Jim Balsillie. Like a shark in the kiddie pool, Howerton delivers the kind of performance that can make a career, or force audiences to totally reconsider an actor’s potential. Jim’s ruthless business instincts run directly counter to the nerds’ undisciplined approach. He agrees to leave his job (technically, he’s already been fired and has no other options) and steer RIM to delivering on its promise — the one Mike and Doug fumbled to articulate in the film’s haphazard opening pitch session, quoting their high school shop teacher: “The person who puts a computer inside a phone will change the world.”

Cruising around in a beat-up Honda hatchback, the duo — and the rest of the RIM team — come across as overgrown toddlers, incapable of cleaning their own rooms. They’re far too rowdy and immature to focus on the task at hand, wasting valuable time playing Command & Conquer at the office, where stacks of defective modems line the walls and someone stuck a toilet plunger on top of a computer monitor. Rarely has a film captured the spirit of creative chaos that characterizes so much of Silicon Valley — although it’s important to note that RIM’s rise-and-fall trajectory took place half a continent away in Waterloo, Ontario.

This is a Canadian story, told by Canadian filmmakers, who treat the whole loony affair as a matter of national pride. Sure, it’s full of hubris, from Mike’s incredulity at the notion that consumers would prefer a keyboard-free device (one of the iPhone’s many design improvements) to Jim’s illegal strategy of backdating stock options to lure engineers from rival companies like Google. But “BlackBerry” is surprisingly charitable to the parties involved, acknowledging that these visionaries, while making it up as they go along, still managed to change the way the world communicates. Taking a page from “The Social Network,” it follows these two altogether-too-polite besties through the ringer, as they try to maintain their friendship amid the financial pressure that running a successful tech company imposes.

There are some who look back fondly on the BlackBerry and the way it let them hammer out emails with their thumbs. It’s a wistfulness on par with how Blockbuster has made a minor comeback for those who claim nostalgia for late fees and the obligation of having to rewind VHS tapes. For most, the BlackBerry was a primitive product that served its purpose until something better came along — namely, the Apple iPhone. And though Johnson’s movie suggests other factors may have contributed to its demise, it’s hard to ignore that the company got out-innovated in the end. The film, at least, feels fresh, making geek history more entertaining than it has any right to be.

Reviewed at Soho House screening room, Los Angeles, Feb. 15, 2023. In Berlin, SXSW film festivals. Running time: 121 MIN.

Production: (Canada) An IFC Films release of an Elevation Pictures, XYZ Films presentation, with the participation of Telefilm Canada, CBC Films, Ontario Creates, in association with IPR.VC, of a Rhombus Media, Zapruder Films production. Producers: Niv Fichman, Matthew Miller, Fraser Ash, Kevin Krikst.
Crew: Director: Matt Johnson. Screenplay: Matt Johnson, Matthew Miller, based on the book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry” by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff. Camera: Jared Raab. Editor: Curt Lobb. Music: Jay McCarrol.
With: Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, Matt Johnson, Rich Sommer, Michael Ironside, Martin Donovan, Michelle Giroux, Sungwon Cho, Mark Critch, Saul Rubinek, Cary Elwes.

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BlackBerry review: one of 2023’s best movies so far

Jay Baruchel and Matt Johnson stand in a crowd in BlackBerry.

“Director Matt Johnson's BlackBerry is a lean and engrossing rise-and-fall drama that currently ranks as one of the year's best films.”

Matt Johnson's confident, assured direction
A trio of compelling lead performances
A complicated story that's made easily digestible
A third-act that pulls its punches just a bit too much

BlackBerry tells a familiar story. 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 . Its players are familiar archetypes and, over the course of BlackBerry ’s two-hour runtime, they fill their roles well. 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.

Unlike The Social Network , though, BlackBerry doesn’t try to make any specific points about the current state of American society. 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. 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.

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. 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. Mike, desperate to rise up through the tech world’s ranks, accepts Jim’s offer.

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. 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. 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.

Those familiar with BlackBerry’s story will already know how everything ultimately ends for Mike, Doug, and Jim. Johnson’s film, to its credit, doesn’t try to hide or surprise viewers with BlackBerry’s inevitable problems. 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.

On-screen, Howerton, Johnson, and Baruchel create a trio of conflicting, distinct personalities. 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. In-between them, Johnson emerges as the heart and soul of BlackBerry . His Doug Fregin is a red-headband-clad movie nerd who is characterized as an anticorporate slacker for much of the film, only to later be revealed to be far wiser about the complex nature of workplace politics than he lets on. Johnson, for his part, imbues the character’s latter turn with enough empathy to render it believable.

Outside of its core trio, BlackBerry establishes a revolving door of memorable supporting characters, including Paul Stannos (Rich Sommer) and Ritchie Cheung (SungWon Cho), a pair of accomplished engineers who get poached from their respective companies by Howerton’s Balsillie. As the arrogant head of a rival phone company that’s interested in taking over BlackBerry, Cary Elwes chews up the scenery and steals one memorable second-act scene, while Saul Rubinek elevates several key moments as the spokesperson for BlackBerry’s biggest carrier partner. Altogether, these actors help flesh out the film’s otherwise stale world of corporate offices and private planes.

Despite BlackBerry ‘s ambitious size and scope, editor Curt Lobb also ensures that the film moves at a consistently fast clip from the moment it begins to the moment it ends. The film speeds through its story — wisely relying on a handful of well-placed needle drops to transition between its three key time periods — without ever introducing its characters and important plot beats too quickly to allow BlackBerry to devolve into a confusing mess. In that sense, the film tonally and narratively resembles 2015’s The Big Short more closely than it does any other. Both movies, notably, succeed at rendering a staggering amount of corporate jargon easily accessible, which is a feat that’s easier said than done.

BlackBerry ’s connections to The Big Short don’t stop and end with its plot. Visually, Johnson adopts the same kind of quasi-documentary style for BlackBerry as its Adam McKay-directed predecessor. The film’s aesthetic, fortunately, elevates its 1990s, analog origins, while Johnson’s slick, fast-paced directorial style works well with BlackBerry ’s editorial pace and on-screen story. The film’s greatest accomplishment, in other words, is just how artistically cohesive and assured it feels. Ultimately, it’s the confidence that Johnson brings to BlackBerry that allows it to enter the same thematic and narrative arena as some of the greatest films in the history of American cinema.

The film, of course, doesn’t quite reach the same heights as many of the classics that have come before it. In its third act, BlackBerry pulls its punches just a bit too much — letting its characters off the hook for mistakes that are far too disastrous to justify the relatively light treatment they’re given. And as compelling as the story of BlackBerry’s rise and fall is, the company’s death at the hands of Apple and others doesn’t ultimately hold as much global weight as some of the other rise-and-fall stories that have been realized on-screen before.

But even if BlackBerry doesn’t hit quite hard enough to be considered an instant classic, it still makes a considerable impact. For its director, the film not only marks a new artistic high, but also announces Johnson as a filmmaker worth paying closer attention to in the years to come. His latest is a film that, unlike its protagonists, makes nearly all the right calls.

BlackBerry is now playing in theaters.

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‘blackberry’ review: jay baruchel and glenn howerton in a scrappy account of the once-ubiquitous smartphone.

Director Matt Johnson also stars in this chronicle of dizzying tech-geek glory preceding a humbling crash and burn.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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It seems like a lifetime ago that the millions of us who spent the early 2000s thumbing away on our BlackBerry smartphones swore those beloved devices would have to be torn from our cold, dead hands before we’d surrender them. The very idea of a cellphone without a trackpad or keyboard seemed like heresy, and for many of us, our introduction to iPhones or other suspiciously sleek Android models was a traumatic transition, making our fingers feel like those clumsy hot dog hands in Everything Everywhere All at Once .

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Never, ever underestimate the power of a glowering, growling Glenn Howerton .

It’s not like the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia co-creator hasn’t previously played someone who acts horrifically yet still keeps you on his side. (See: Every single episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Howerton is in.) Nor is it off-brand for the writer-actor-producer to take on a role in which he radiates that he’s better than the idiots and saps and suckers surrounding him, as fans of the late, great sitcom A.P. Bio can attest. But Howerton brings something to BlackBerry , the scrappy Canadian indie about a scrappy Canadian company that changed the world, that goes above and beyond his usual lovable sociopath act. It’s not range. It’s rage. Pure, 100-percent uncut short-fuse anger. Beautiful, sputtering, spittle-flying fury.

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And still: There’s Howerton, his head gleaming like a bullet about to be fired into some unlucky soul’s heart, a beacon of desire for power and prestige and maybe the chance to own his own hockey team, burning through every scene like not only Balsillie’s livelihood but his life depended on it. There’s something so compelling about what he’s doing that he almost convinces you that BlackBerry is better than it is. And then you remember that it’s still a movie that treats “good enough” as the enemy of perfection and creativity, yet still feels it’s acceptable to be just good enough as a dramatization based on a true story. Irony — it’s a bitch.

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BlackBerry review: how a tech revolution became a geek tragedy

Jay baruchel and glenn howerton deliver engaging performances in this entertaining tale about the rise and fall of a smartphone pioneer.

Technology delivers all types of incredible societal advances. But the mad-dash nature of Western capitalism and the emotional fitfulness of the consumer marketplace also creates graveyards of arriviste empires—faddish companies with a product or service that intersects heavily with a particular moment in time, but ends in the type of mismanaged disaster only fully understood postmortem. BlackBerry , directed by multi-hyphenate Matt Johnson, is an engaging new film that charts the incredible rise and spectacular flameout of its titular product, the world’s first smartphone—which, for a period of time, controlled 45 percent of the cell phone market and seemed unstoppable as a cultural force.

Spinning off Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s nonfiction book Losing The Signal , Johnson and co-screenwriter Matthew Miller invest heartily in the story’s personalities. But instead of reverence or preciousness, they frame BlackBerry as an oddball workplace dramedy about industry gate-crashers rudely ejected from a party of their own staging.

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The film opens in 1996 in Ontario, where Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) oversees a software firm known as Research in Motion which operates like a social club as much as a business. Its culture of immaturity is embodied most robustly by headband-sporting co-founder Douglas Fregin (Johnson again), and the importance of collecting on money contractually owed seems on par with communal video game sessions.

Into this den of juvenilia steps Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), who talks himself into a job as CEO. He quickly recognizes Lazaridis’ value as an inventor and fast-tracks an aggressive plan for a fanciful prototype that will leverage existing data networks and allow customers to quickly access email from their mobile devices. BlackBerry, the product, is a smash hit, and quickly becomes a market leader.

The BlackBerry trailer promises a movie that’ll give your thumbs a workout

In an act seemingly designed to overtly terrorize his employees, Balsillie brings in as COO Charles Purdy (Michael Ironside), a scowling taskmaster who cancels movie night and derides workers as “little children playing with their little penises.” Balsillie’s strategic disengagement enables him to outmaneuver a takeover bid by Palm, Inc. CEO Carl Yankowski (Cary Elwes, in a small cameo that could stand to be fleshed out) and grow the company even more.

At around the 75-minute mark, the movie jumps forward to 2007, as Apple prepares the launch of its iPhone. While Lazaridis fiddles around with adjusted trackpads for the BlackBerry Bold, other dodgy deals and past corners cut come back to haunt the company, contributing to a fatal down swirl.

BlackBerry admirably shrinks the aperture of its story’s technical elements, and eschews the shrewd social inventorying or scrupulous myth-making that Aaron Sorkin brought to The Social Network and Steve Jobs . While the lack of a bigger look at the global mania the “Crackberry” wrought sometimes feels reductive, the characters here are interesting enough for the most part to acquit the tradeoff.

In broad strokes, the film is closer to something like The Founder , rooted in the shark-y sensibilities of an outside pathogen. It skews more humorous, though, seeking relatable bemusement over narrative tension. It’s not really a tale about business success and failure, but rather the loss of innocence, and the dividing line between adolescence and adulthood.

The other interesting aspect of the story is how, in many ways, Lazaridis and Balsillie represent two sides of the same coin. The former—an absorbed, head-in-the-clouds creative visionary—needed a ruthless, bottom-line-oriented fixer to unlock his full potential. The latter, meanwhile, needed something he could sell, even if he didn’t much understand all the details.

The acting wonderfully abets this interpretation. There’s a nervy, dangerous energy to Howerton’s mesmerizingly icy performance, which registers in an almost animalistic way. Rooted not so much in amorality as a complete lack of any guiding principle other than to always keep moving, Howerton portrays Balsillie as an apex predator who, even when on your “side,” could turn around and eat your face off. Constitutionally disgusted by the undisciplined nature of those surrounding him, Howerton conveys that Balsillie’s approach is less to bend people to his will than to simply operate at altitude, above them.

Baruchel, meanwhile, is afforded a nice chance to stretch. The first two-thirds or so of the movie finds him trading in tones and modes—scatterbrained, anxious, nervous apologia—that will read as familiar to many viewers. In its home stretch, though, as BlackBerry shows the weight of adult choices, Baruchel seeds his performance with small notes of both frustration and regret. It’s a smartly calibrated turn.

On a technical level, Johnson oversees a smart package. A selection of songs by the Stereo MCs, Joy Division, Moby, and The Strokes taps into a general spirit of the changing times without relying on jukebox emotionality. Obviously modestly budgeted, BlackBerry embraces a low-fi vibe that suits it well, especially during the early, DIY days of the company. Cinematographer Jared Raab’s camerawork leans heavily into handheld and slightly voyeuristic, courting an aggressively inquisitive tone, and communicating the silent paradox gripping many of its subjects: we’re succeeding—wildly, actually—but is this in fact sustainable?

Eventually, though, this visual tack reaches a point of diminishing returns. The filmmakers feel so all-in and beholden to this approach that, for example, they cut away from Lazaridis during a pivotal emotional revelation to indulge more over-the-shoulder background detail.

It’s true that an operatic presentation of ruination or consequences wouldn’t fit BlackBerry . But it does feel like the movie misses the chance for some stick-the-landing moments related to the fates of its chief characters. That said, Johnson’s entertaining time capsule does still capture, in its unfussy way, one immutable truth: good times aren’t meant to last forever.

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BlackBerry Reviews

Giving the turbulent tale of one of America’s first smartphone’s rise and fall an appropriately rollicking biopic, Matt Johnson transforms what could’ve been a dry visual representation of a Wikipedia article into a mini tech epic.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 22, 2024

Stories about American entrepreneurs are as old and fraudulent as our stories about discovery and the frontier—but BlackBerry has no such love for the corporate ethos.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 20, 2024

Every time Howerton enters a scene, he exudes a pure, visceral intensity in a way that is terrifying, hilarious, and consistently captivating.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 12, 2024

Howerton almost rescues this uneven, chaotic film in a performance that will make you wonder where this has been his entire career, but this is the BlackBerry of techy biopics. It’s nothing new anymore.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 4, 2024

A fascinating, entertaining and – somewhat ironic – look back at a one-time, must-have item that once made up 45% of the cellphone market.

Full Review | May 26, 2024

It’s a culture clash business comic-drama where the geeks and the suits go on a rollercoaster ride, a story stripped of outside life but rife with telling touches.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 18, 2024

One of 2023's 20 best films.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 12, 2024

As the film progresses, the humor becomes more ironic, but it never loses its ability to make us reflect and laugh at the same time. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Mar 1, 2024

The comedy comes instead from Johnson’s deliberate direction. It’s found in an ironic zoom here, a hilarious cut there. This alchemy finds the most magic in how it supports Glenn Howerton’s towering performance.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2024

It is in Glenn Howerton’s over-the-top portrayal of Jim that BlackBerry soars above everything else you’ve seen in this genre, and catapults BlackBerry into the satirical stratosphere.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 3, 2024

Friendship and family start us off...and here we are still thrashing...

Full Review | Jan 5, 2024

It's a devilishly entertaining comedy-drama, that boasts solid performances and never loses its consistent pace chronicling the rise and fall of BlackBerry. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 2, 2024

Jay Baruchel is wonderful as BlackBerry creator Mike Lazaridis, but it’s Glenn Howerton who steals the show as co-CEO Jim Balsillie, giving a hysterical, hot-tempered performance that could slot right into an episode of Succession.

Full Review | Dec 22, 2023

[It's] a tale of what happens when pals become business partners, when smart little companies get into bed with big dumb ones, and what happens to game-changers when the rules are been thrown out the window by someone else.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 8, 2023

It’s by the numbers, and its sense of self importance renders it all kind of silly.

Full Review | Nov 28, 2023

Presenting us with very human protagonists and developing a potentially boring narrative with energy, “BlackBerry” works as a docu-drama. Surely those who were alive at this time and had a BlackBerry will feel some nostalgia. Full review in Spanish.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 25, 2023

Despite playing the story for more laughs than are probably necessary, the lead performances of BlackBerry are very watchable, and the story of the brand’s rise and demise is certainly one worth watching.

Full Review | Nov 15, 2023

This entertaining film features standout work from Baruchel, especially when he begins to crack with the realization that Apple is getting ready to kill his company with their upcoming iPhone, a product with the highest consumer interest in history.

Full Review | Oct 24, 2023

BlackBerry is an impressive feat that marks Johnson’s leap from indie darling/TV Director to someone to genuinely watch out for.

Full Review | Oct 18, 2023

Investing heartily in its story's personalities, and eschewing myth-making reverence or preciousness, BlackBerry's makers entertainingly frame their film as a workplace dramedy about industry gate-crashers rudely ejected from a party of their own staging.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Oct 15, 2023

‘BlackBerry,’ about the device’s rise and fall, presses all the right buttons

This is one of those whip-smart, character- and story-driven gems that grabs you from the start and never lets go..

Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel, left), co-founder of the company behind the Blackberry, takes on a ruthless partner, Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), in “BlackBerry.”

Three of the most entertaining movies of 2023 have told the origin stories of game-changing innovations from the latter part of the 20th century that left quite the stamp on the popular culture. First there was the breezy Apple TV+ Cold War romp “Tetris,” followed by Ben Affleck’s masterful “Air.” And now comes Matthew Johnson’s wickedly funny and kinetic “BlackBerry,” a classic inventor/underdog tale about that brief and shining era when a handheld device from Canada had millions of us working our thumbs to the bone as we obsessed over that tactile, clicking keyboard. The BlackBerry was so addictive it was dubbed “CrackBerry.” Remember? And then ... not so much.

The difference: Whereas “Tetris” tells us in the closing credits the game has sold more than a half billion copies and remains popular, and “Air” reaches its conclusion when we’re just at the beginning of Nike’s ascent to global domination, “BlackBerry” reminds us in the end title cards, “At its height, BlackBerry controlled 45% of the cell phone market. … Today, it’s 0%.” You probably know the reason why BlackBerry crashed and burned; if not, you can look it up on your iPhone, ahem.

Thanks to the clever, docudrama style direction by Matt Johnson, a crackling good screenplay by Johnson and Matthew Miller and searingly good performances from the ensemble cast, the scenes where BlackBerry crashes and burns are just as enthralling as the triumphant moments when an unlikely team of ragtag techno geeks based in Waterloo, Ontario, briefly revolutionized the mobile device world. Based on the book “Losing the Signal” by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff and sure to invite comparisons with “The Social Network” and “Glengarry Glen Ross” (a movie that is actually name-dropped by one character), this is one of those whip-smart, character- and story-driven gems that grabs you from the start and never lets go. I can’t wait to watch it again.

Jay Baruchel is an actor sometimes prone to overdoing it with the quirky mannerisms, but he delivers one of the best and most empathetic performances of his career as Mike Lazaridis, the silver-haired, socially awkward co-founder of the Canadian software company Research in Motion (RIM), which in the early 1990s consisted of Mike, his best friend and co-founder, the goofy man-child Douglas Fregin (played by director Johnson), and a handful of uber-nerds who spent their days soldering together bits and pieces of tech and taking breaks for heated “Star Trek” message board arguments and movie nights.

It’s a savvy but cash-poor operation on the verge of going out of business—until Mike partners up with the ruthless, take-no-prisoners businessman Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), over the strong objections of Doug. Jim is a maniac—breaking phones, screaming at employees, threatening the likes of Palm CEO Carl Yankowski (a fantastic Cary Elwes), wheeling and dealing in ways that draw the attention of the SEC—but for a time, he’s the right maniac for the job.

Arguably the best scene in the movie occurs when Jim’s presentation to the Verizon board about a revolutionary new BlackBerry that will handle emails on a whole new level is about to die a quick death—until Mike stumbles in and unveils a cobbled-together prototype that leaves Saul Rubinek’s top exec speechless. Cue the real-life footage of Oprah Winfrey unboxing shiny blue BlackBerrys and proclaiming, “It sends and receives e-mail messages, it is also a cell phone!” as the studio audience erupts as if they’ve won the lottery.

BlackBerry quickly becomes a thing, a huge thing, with Mike gradually morphing into a suit-clad company exec, Doug desperately trying to retain the sense of playfulness and wonder that once permeated the company and Jim taking his bull-in-a-china-shop act on the road, making promises he can’t keep, manufacturing ways to elevate the stock and recruiting top engineers from places such as Google. You can almost sense the trackball scrolling off the rails even as BlackBerry becomes a dominant force in the market and in the popular culture.

With cinematographer Jared Raab shooting in a handheld style that sometimes gives us the feeling of eavesdropping on events from the hallway, “BlackBerry” retains a sense of authenticity even as it embraces the black comedy. For all of Mike’s genius, he’s taken completely by surprise when Steve Jobs unveils the first iPhone (“an iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator ... [in] one device”), and unwisely brushes it off as a silly toy that will never work. He’s also blind to Jim’s increasingly reckless actions and seems incapable, or unwilling, to make tough choices about the company’s future. (Doug might have been the goofy one, but he was also smart enough to see the end coming, and he sold his BlackBerry stock at its height in 2007 and became one of the wealthiest man in Canada.)

In the end, though, “BlackBerry” isn’t a cautionary tale about greed or hubris; it’s the story of someone who executed a great idea and was on top of the game—until someone came up with an even better idea that sent the BlackBerry packing to the back of your junk drawer.

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BlackBerry Is More Office Space Than Social Network

When we first glimpse Glenn Howerton’s Jim Balsillie in BlackBerry , we see only the top half of his face, caught in a rearview mirror. So he’s all eyebrows and forehead, a near-comical vision of drive and animalistic ambition, as he pulls into a parking spot and looks around suspiciously, noting a limo full of corporate types filing out behind him. It’s a streamlined and accurate first impression. Described as a “shark,” the ruthless Balsillie turns out to be just what the clumsy, introverted nerds who founded Research in Motion (RIM), the tiny company that in the late 1990s and early 2000s would transform the cell-phone industry, need to make their harebrained schemes reality.

Directed by Matt Johnson, BlackBerry basically presents the story of RIM and the rise of the smartphone as a sitcom pitch: What happens when two affable, not-ready-for-prime-time dorks from Waterloo, Canada — brilliant engineer Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and his can-do cheerleader pal Doug Fregin (Johnson) — are joined by a crisply suited, Harvard-educated, phone-smashing apex predator. Balsillie is not a tech guy, and it’s only by chance that he realizes the potential of Lazaridis and Fregin’s idea of a cell phone that can also send and receive emails. But he knows how to sell, and he knows how to go for the kill when he’s got something he knows people want. It’s a solid comic setup. One of the great pleasures of BlackBerry is watching Balsillie’s befuddled, running disgust at Lazaridis and Fregin’s hapless ways, at the chaotic ineptitude of their finances, their utter lack of business sense, their go-along-to-get-along management style. I would happily watch several seasons of these three going at it.

But there’s also a strain of fear running through Howerton’s portrayal of Balsillie that brings dramatic urgency to the film. He joins RIM after getting fired from his previous job (apparently for being too much of a go-getter), and in all his actions we sense a simmering terror at what will happen if this new endeavor fails. Even after the movie zooms forward to the 2000s, when BlackBerry devices were ubiquitous and RIM was on top of the world, Balsillie is in corporate panic mode, frantically trying to sell more units and innovate rapidly — or rather, force others to innovate rapidly — to avoid being bought out by the people who make PalmPilots. (Remember PalmPilots?) In other words, success begets more fear. There’s probably a disturbing lesson in there somewhere.

It’s the comic energy generated by the triumvirate of Howerton, Baruchel, and Johnson that really drives BlackBerry , but Johnson and his co-writer Matthew Miller also find lively ways to dramatize the technological concepts at play. Saul Rubinek has a memorable turn as an executive at a phone company who questions and even mocks RIM’s intentions at every turn, thus setting up scenes that helpfully explain just what exactly these engineers are up to. It’s a pretty transparent device; over the course of decades, Rubinek’s character doesn’t seem to age or even change chairs. But it works marvelously, because BlackBerry never takes itself too seriously.

In fact, the film’s charm is that it doesn’t take itself seriously at all. BlackBerry is more Office Space than Social Network . Even the main characters’ hairlines — Howerton’s fake-looking bald head (which he apparently shaved), Baruchel’s phony blond wig, and Johnson’s ever-present red bandana — look like discards from a sketch-comedy troupe. By keeping things so loose, Johnson is able to get away with his simplifications and any convenient rewritings of the facts. But the approach also gives the actors free rein to go big and broad, because that’s where the laughs usually are. The filmmakers in this case are content to entertain; if you learn some history along the way, that’s on you.

Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly stated that Howerton is wearing a bald cap in the film; that is his actual (shaved) head.

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Review: A frenetic take on the crash-and-burn trajectory of the iconic ‘BlackBerry’

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For a certain generation (mostly Gen X and older millennials), the BlackBerry wasn’t just a phone with email — it was a world- and life-altering shift, a status symbol that quickly became a shackle to the inbox. While those lifestyle aspects aren’t necessarily explored in the device biopic “BlackBerry,” written and directed by Matt Johnson, they float to the surface of the subconscious for those who experienced the smartphone revolution in real time.

Johnson leans into the nostalgia , seeding period-appropriate tunes like the Strokes’ “Someday” to aid the acid-flashbacks to the mid-aughts, and utilizing VHS-style camcorder footage in montage. But he also opens with a foreboding bit of archival footage of Arthur C. Clarke declaring that “men will no longer commute—they will communicate,” a promise realized to an extreme during the COVID-19 pandemic (the next corporate biopic should be “Zoom”).

The possibility of email in your fist seemed like a passport to the utopian lifestyle of the digital nomad: Just imagine, you could email from the beach. Then the reality manifests, and suddenly you have to send emails while you’re on the beach, thereby ruining the whole point of being on a beach. It meant less liberation from the office and more never not working, creating a Pavlovian response to the clicks, dings and buzzes.

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These suddenly ubiquitous devices, pressed into the hands of executives and assistants everywhere in the early 2000s, seemed to spring out of thin air, and then suddenly vanished with the advent of the touch-screen iPhone. Johnson and co-writer Matthew Miller, adapting the book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry,” by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, show us where the BlackBerry came from and details its demise at the hands of market forces and business missteps. Johnson, a Canadian filmmaker and actor known for the 2016 indie mockumentary “Operation Avalanche,” about NASA, situates “BlackBerry” as a proudly north-of-the-border story: a biopic of the device invented by the Waterloo, Ontario-based company Research in Motion, and a business thriller, utilizing his faux documentary style.

Cinematographer Jacob Raab’s camera is very, very busy: constantly roaming, zooming in, focusing, glancing up and down, hiding behind doors and windows, spying on the characters as if it’s someone else in the room or an amateur cameraman fiddling with a new toy.

This immersive, restless style takes a bit of getting used to, and so does Johnson, who co-stars as Douglas Fregin, the co-founder of Research in Motion and the wild, antic, playful nerd to Jay Baruchel’s brilliant but cripplingly unassertive Mike Lazaridis, who obsessively attempts to quiet the electro-buzz of products manufactured in China. They have a great plan to put email in a phone, but their business acumen is atrocious. They’re too busy having movie night with their employees to realize they’ve been taken for a million-dollar ride by U.S. Robotics.

Glenn Howerton in the movie "BlackBerry."

Enter Jim Balsillie, played with a florid ferocity by Glenn Howerton , the top of his head shaved to replicate Balsillie’s male-pattern baldness. He reaches out to Mike and Doug when he finds himself out of a job and offers them an influx of cash for a stake in the company. He finds Research in Motion completely disorganized, up to its eyeballs in debt, and so he leverages his mortgage, and with his Harvard Business School training, utilizes the time-honored tradition of screaming expletives and doing light securities fraud to build BlackBerry into the market behemoth that it became.

It’s a strange sensation, watching “BlackBerry,” to find yourself rooting for morally compromised screamer Jim (Howerton is simply dazzling in the role) and the iron-fist enforcer he hires as chief operating officer, Charles Purdy (Michael Ironside). Johnson’s Doug would turn the company into a playground for his pals if he had his way, while Mike is too avoidant and passive to assert authority, leaving the dirty work to Jim. Howerton is also far and away the most charismatic performer onscreen, and you’re unable to rip your eyes away from him, though Baruchel is doing fascinating, if subtler, work as well.

What emerges from the electronic noise and fussy aesthetic of “BlackBerry” is a compelling portrait of a company that flew too close to the sun. Jim’s fast-and-loose tactics in running the business — poaching talent from Google, creating demand for the devices as status symbols, and selling them before the network capability was established — are matched by Mike’s innovative mind, but it could only last for so long, especially with Apple nipping at their heels. However, it’s the shortcuts and shady deals that do them in, not the shiny new iPhone.

Perhaps Mike, a man driven by the sonic and tactile experience of electronics, was too attached to the satisfying clicking of the tiny keyboard. With 2000s nostalgia in the zeitgeist, maybe Icarus will rise again, though Johnson’s portrait indicates how unlikely that would be.

'BlackBerry'

Rated: R, for language throughout Running time: 2 hours, 4 minutes Playing: Starts May 12 in general release

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'BlackBerry' review: The comedy and tragedy of the innovator's dilemma

It's funny, dramatic and one of the best movies about tech..

BlackBerry has everything Apple's Tetris film lacked : human drama grounded in actual history, without the need to spice things up with car chases and fantastical storytelling. On the face of it, the rise and fall of Research in Motion's keyboard-equipped smartphone may not seem inherently compelling. But the brilliance of the film — directed by Matt Johnson, who also co-wrote it with Matthew Miller — is that it makes the BlackBerry's journey feel like a genuine tragedy.

It's driven by two dramatically different people: RIM’s co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis, a nebbishy genius of an engineer, and Jim Balsillie, a ruthless and perpetually angry businessman. They struggled on their own, but together were able to rule the mobile industry for more than a decade. And then came the iPhone, which instantly reversed their fortunes.

Like many former titans, RIM fell victim to the innovator's dilemma . As described by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, it's what happens when large and successful companies are entirely focused on iterating on existing products and appeasing customers. That leaves room for a more nimble newcomer to come along and develop something revolutionary that the incumbents could never have imagined.

In this case, it's Apple's iPhone, which lands like a nuclear bomb in the technology world. The film shows Lazaridis and his engineering team watching Steve Jobs' iconic iPhone keynote in disbelief. Lazaridis is the genius protagonist we've seen come up with the idea of a handheld, keyboard-equipped pocket computer that's efficient enough to run on unused, low-bandwidth wireless signals. Even after BlackBerry takes off, we see him have another stroke of inspiration with BlackBerry Messenger, a service that delivered free messaging to RIM's customers at a time when carriers charged 10 cents per SMS text. It was a brilliant maneuver that made BlackBerry users even more loyal, since BBM wasn't accessible on any other device.

Even though he was no stranger to game-changing innovation himself, Lazaridis didn't think the iPhone would work. It was too expensive. It didn't have a physical keyboard. And it was built to gobble up mobile data (something RIM took pains to avoid). Who would want that? Turns out everyone did. While the iPhone was indeed pricey at launch, carrier subsidies made it easier to stomach. Its large screen, (eventual) App Store and revolutionary OS made up for its touch-based keyboard. And it arrived just as 3G networks were rolling out, which gave carriers more of an incentive to charge customers for data instead of cellular minutes. Just as the BlackBerry gave us a glimpse of an always-connected world in 1999, the iPhone promised to put the full power of the internet in your pocket.

Spoilers for real life, I guess: BlackBerry dropped from having 20 percent of the global smartphone market share in 2010 to 0 percent in 2017, according to Statista . For people who weren't around for the company's heyday, the film serves as a valuable history lesson.

Crucially, though, it's not just like reading a Wikipedia entry. Johnson tells us exactly who Laziridis and Balsillie are from the very first scenes of the movie. As Laziridis and his RIM co-founder Doug Fregin prepare for a pitch meeting with Balsillie, he can't help but notice a buzzing intercom in the room. It's made in China, which to him is a red flag for bad engineering. So, almost without thinking, Laziridis tears it open and fixes a defective component. Balsillie, meanwhile, spends that time scheming to take the limelight away from a co-worker, simply because he thinks he's smarter than everyone around him.

While that first meeting doesn't go well, it's almost as if Laziridis and Balsillie's lives are destined to intertwine. The engineer needs someone with business smarts to sell his vision, and the business man needs something hot to sell. As played by Jay Baruchel ( This is the End , How to Train Your Dragon ), Lazaridis is practically a poster child for socially awkward engineers. Glenn Howerton, meanwhile, channels the childish energy of his It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia character to portray Balsillie as a coked-up ball of rage. He may get results, but he also has the uncanny ability to turn every room into a toxic workplace.

BlackBerry succeeds by making us care about Laziridis and his cadre of geeks, and by making Balsillie’s antics relentlessly entertaining (even when he’s being a complete jerk). But what’s most impressive is that it gives the story of Research in Motion a compelling dramatic shape: the rise of the genius, the defeat of his enemies (Palm’s potential hostile takeover of the company is particularly harrowing) and the inevitable downfall. It’ll forever change the way you view BlackBerry. And for the tech titans of today, the movie is a textbook example of how quickly you can fall from grace.

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“BlackBerry” Tracks a Tech Dream That Died

Two faces with large glasses in a room full of hard drives and wires.

If you enjoyed Ben Affleck’s “ Air ,” currently in theatres, but felt that it was too puffed up, here comes a lesson in deflation. Matt Johnson’s “BlackBerry” is a reminder that, in dramatic terms, rise and fall is almost always more gripping, and more morally provoking, than rise and rise. For those who were off-planet, or awaiting conception, at the dawn of the millennium, the title may need some explanation. A BlackBerry was a portable communication device, equipped with buttons so itty-bitty that they could not be comfortably deployed by anybody larger than Rumpelstiltskin. Nonetheless, for a while, owning a BlackBerry was all the rage. It could slot into a holster on your belt, allowing you to draw it like a Colt and fire off a lethal message to that guy with the goatee in Accounts.

Johnson shows us how the rage began. Not content with directing the new film, and writing it with Matthew Miller, he also stars as Doug Fregin, one of the creators of the BlackBerry, and, if the movie is to be believed, the most committed wearer of a headband since John McEnroe. (Summoned to a business meeting, Doug keeps his headband on even while clad in a suit .) Doug and his thirtysomething pal Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel)—whose hair is gray from the outset, as if sapped of color by the power of the adjacent brain—are the co-founders of a small Canadian outfit called Research in Motion. Has corporate nomenclature ever been more dazzlingly dull?

Much of the action, kicking off in 1996, takes place in the company offices; most of it, indeed, looks like an episode of “ The Office .” The camera appears to be caffeinated, refusing to settle, darting from one worried face to the next. That restlessness, though tiring to behold, works because it mimics the inquisitive energy of the characters. Near the start, while Mike is nerving himself to present a pitch, he gets so annoyed by the buzzy hiss of an intercom that he can’t help taking it apart. He and Doug are seeking investors for their product, the PocketLink. (Another dead name.) It is, Doug says, “a pager, a cell phone, and an e-mail machine all in one.” But he and his colleagues are computer folk, unschooled in the dark arts of peddling their big idea. What they need is a shark.

Enter Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), a balding hammerhead who has lost his previous job for not obeying orders. Fired up by being fired, he arrives at Research in Motion and makes a modest proposal. “I want fifty per cent of the company, and I’ve got to be C.E.O.,” he says, sounding like a kid pretending to be an important grownup. This subtle strain of childishness runs through the film. Witness Jim vandalizing a phone booth in a tantrum, as if he were wrecking a dying technology in his quest for the youthfully new. Or listen to Mike, when he learns that he won’t be able to bring Doug to a meeting with Bell Atlantic: “He’s my best friend!” Cue the sight of Doug, standing forlornly at a window. When one of them does reject the other, later on, you wince at the pain of the split.

What causes the fissure is, needless to say, success. Johnson is not so insolent as to sneer at commercial ambition, but unlike Affleck he doesn’t burnish his movie into a hymn of praise. What appeals to him, I think, is the way in which striving toward triumph means, in practice, stumbling along with a mixture of haplessness and gall. En route to Bell Atlantic, Mike leaves his briefcase in a cab and hares off to retrieve it; Jim, all alone, has to convince the executives of the merits of the BlackBerry, despite not understanding how it hooks up to a network. (“You’re selling self-reliance,” he declares, falling back on Emersonian blah.) Somehow, as on a BlackBerry, everything clicks, and suddenly, with a series of forward leaps, we find ourselves in an atmosphere of private jets, of supergeeks being poached from the likes of Google for ten million dollars, and of Mike, now nervously suave, with his locks combed upward in a stiff quiff. BlackBerry has ripened into a phenomenon, and its employees no longer have time to smile.

Everything ends badly, or sadly, and one can imagine the film being screened for M.B.A. students as a cautionary tale—frequently very funny, but often disheartening, too. It’s only natural that Mike and the gang should be rocked by Steve Jobs’s launch of the iPhone, in 2007; what screws them is their response, the following year, in the shape of the BlackBerry Storm, which sounds like the dessert you don’t want on an experimental tasting menu. Once we hear lines such as “Is this legal?,” and see agents from the S.E.C. prowling BlackBerry’s headquarters, we know that the game is winding down. Not that we should feel that sorry for the major players. Each of them was left drenched in wealth.

“BlackBerry” turns out to be an oddly touching portrait of a nerdocratic society. Its resident bunch of bright, awkward souls are bothered by the tasks that confront them, yet they all find joy in the bothering—in having to build an overnight prototype, say, of their beloved device, with a soldering iron if necessary. (It’s fitting that the final shot should be of Mike, lately dethroned but still obsessively tinkering with handsets.) Nothing is more wonkish about life at BlackBerry, at least in the early days, than the in-house custom of movie night, when everyone stops to watch films like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or John Carpenter’s “They Live.” The latter is a perfect choice, because Carpenter tells of aliens who covertly persuade us, via messages secreted in mass media, to buy into capitalist conformity. So the question is: Did Mike, Doug, and their buddies break the mold, or were they, like the aliens, just molding us into ever more desperate consumers? And, if it’s true that Jim had never seen “Star Wars,” should they even have hired him to begin with?

The first place that we see in Manuela Martelli’s new movie, “Chile ’76,” is Venice—a sleight of hand, since the whole film is set in Chile. A woman named Carmen (Aline Küppenheim), middle-aged and elegantly dressed, leafs through images of Venice in a book, picks out a peachy sunset, and asks a man in a hardware store to match the color. We watch the paint being stirred in a metal bucket, and then drops of it falling onto her shoe. Such is Martelli’s method, brisk and oblique, for steering us into the story. Here is a member of the leisured class, we gather, with delicate tastes and time to spare; yet somehow that flesh-tinted splotch, trivial as it is, hints that all is not well. There will be more besmirchings to come.

As the title suggests, we are in the era of the military junta, which took power in 1973. Its reach is extensive, and in scene after scene we can’t be sure whether a vexing detail—an odd noise on a phone line, a stranger taking a seat opposite Carmen in a café—is mere happenstance or proof of dictatorial intrusion. You might think that Carmen would be free of such fears. After all, she is married to a rich doctor, who is employed at a hospital in Santiago. From the city, she travels to their holiday home, near a beach; that’s where the new paint is required, and where most of the tale unfolds. A couple who pay them a visit there, and take them sailing, certainly seem like fans of the regime; the wife talks airily of Chile’s need for a strong leader. If they knew what Carmen has been up to, on the quiet, since she arrived on the coast, they would be struck dumb.

Years before, Carmen worked for the Red Cross. Now, at the request of a local priest, and unbeknownst to her loved ones, she finds herself caring for a young man, Elías (Nicolás Sepúlveda), who has a gunshot wound. Although the priest calls him “a starving Christ,” she soon realizes that he’s a political activist in hiding. What stirs her to help him, however, is not ideology, let alone any impulse to rebel, but the goodness of her palpitating heart. She is a born fretter, who takes too many pills and lights a cigarette upon waking. When a family friend describes her as “smart and gorgeous” and wonders what her secret is, Carmen replies, “Just neurosis.”

It’s a hell of a performance from Küppenheim as the heroine, precisely because she demonstrates how hard it is to be heroic. To an absurd degree, cinema has conditioned us to expect protagonists who take every challenge in their stride, and it’s salutary to be reminded that, for the Carmens of this world (the majority of us, that is), the creeping approach of danger is anything but a thrill. Obliged to contact Elías’s comrades, Carmen has to take buses to an unfamiliar town, to learn passwords, and even to acquire an alias—Cleopatra. Far from delighting in these novel risks, she quakes, and there’s a fabulous sequence, filmed from Carmen’s point of view, inside her car, at a police checkpoint. As the cop walks away to inspect her license, she waits, in the glow of the dashboard, whispering Hail Marys under her breath. Martelli’s movie, finely controlled, and tense with the perpetual promise of violence, lasts little more than an hour and a half. Imagine that tension enduring, as it did in Chile, for seventeen years. ♦

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‘BlackBerry’ Review: The Once-Ubiquitous Smartphone Gets Its Own Spin on ‘The Social Network’

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. IFC Films releases the film in theaters on Friday, May 12.

Is there anything worse than becoming obsolete? It’s a fear many share — to be slowly forgotten and discarded, left on a proverbial roadside as the rest of the world continues to innovate at pace around us. It isn’t just a business concern, but a human one: the innate craving for relevancy in a world where something or someone shinier than you is always around the corner.

But “BlackBerry,” which follows Canadian software company Research in Motion and the mistakes made by co-CEOs Mike Lazarides (Jay Baruchel) and Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), uses lashes of retrospective irony to dive into the precarity of monolithic success. With a good deal of zippy snark à la “The Social Network” and a sense of deadpan comedy straight from the “Succession” playbook, “BlackBerry” is the kind of mid-budget marvel that doesn’t seem to come around often anymore.

With it, director and screenwriter Matt Johnson takes a plot that could be a dull walk-through of the phone’s Wikipedia page and transforms it into something altogether more biting and blithe, less a cautionary tale than a gently mocking takedown of corporate hubris.

It’s hard to remember where it all went wrong for the BlackBerry: one day men were more likely to ask for a girl’s BBM pin than her phone number, and then the existence of the phone was seemingly scrubbed from our collective memory. We meet Lazarides and his bumbling co-founder Douglas Fregin (played by Johnson himself) in 1992, when Research in Motion is more an after-school club of film nerds than budding start-up, before a catastrophic product pitch somehow piques the interest of tech businessman Balsillie.

Beyond plot twists and turns, though — of which there are many, in a surprisingly fascinating peek into the developments of handheld telephony over the past three decades (stay with me) — Johnson’s direction and script is the movie’s secret weapon. While adapted from Jacquie McNish’s book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry,” it is Johnson’s trademark style that elevates the material.

In a scrappy, DIY-esque sensibility also adopted in 2013’s “The Dirties” and 2016’s “Operation Avalanche,” the outlook is zany and the camera is shaky, deploying endless hand-held comic zooms to enforce a kind of mockumentary smarm. His character is obsessed with movie strong men in works like “Wall Street” and “Glengarry Glen Ross,” yet this film lampoons that very image, exposing the hollowness within.

It’s not a film in which the people depicted would be happy or flattered with their portrayal; Baruchel’s Lazarides is a pushover with a severe shortage of charisma, while Howerton’s Balsillie is a comic-book Machiavelli of rapacious unlikeability. Yet, alongside Johnson, this central trio put on stellar performances in a film that seems largely unconcerned with personal backstories or money. Baruchel in particular is playing things startlingly small — not, ahem, phoning it in, but rather acting as a neat and necessary straight foil to the other two leads’ megalomania.

It’s all a rather fascinating story that we didn’t even know we would be interested in — the way that, both personally and professionally, the need to endlessly innovate in order to stay relevant is exhausting at best and soul-destroying at worst, robbing you of the ability to relax and live in the moment. Here, one’s success always means another’s failure, and therein lies the deeply depressing issue at the heart of capitalism. BlackBerry aren’t the first casualty of this and they won’t be the last. And when a shiny new toy catches our eye, we won’t hesitate to upgrade to the next best shiny thing.

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BlackBerry Review

In the years since The Social Network , many have tried to recreate that winning combination of a ‘how stuff gets made’ story and ripped-from-real-life human drama. This year alone, we’ve already seen The Beanie Bubble and Dumb Money follow the Social Network formula to a lesser or greater degree. Director Matt Johnson largely sticks to said formula with BlackBerry , but imbues it with an idiosyncratic charm and comedic bite.

Based on Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book Losing The Signal , the film follows Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson), the scruffy co-founders of Research In Motion, whose innovative tech designs are underserved by their lack of public-facing skills. Enter Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), a ruthless bully of a businessman who can, and does, turn their dreams into gold. Together, their smartphone prototype becomes the BlackBerry — which at one stage in its short life made up 45 per cent of the cellphone market.

Baruchel gets to flex a few different muscles here, his anxious mannerisms calcifying into impatience and desperation.

Baruchel, whose career has largely seen him play nervy underdogs, wears Mike’s ill-fitting suit like a glove, while Johnson bounces around him like a spirited, headband-sporting Labrador, all loyalty but no business savvy. Yet Howerton is the film’s terrifying, magnetic wild card. Not so much chewing the scenery as ripping it apart with his incisors like a rabid wolf, the actor — who has finessed steely-eyed malice in sitcom It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia — is a revelation here. A tight, energised ball of rage, he occasionally and deliciously explodes on screen, treating us to curse-laden outbursts so violent and raw that they would make Joe Pesci wilt.

Johnson captures the trio’s disastrous dynamic mockumentary-style, which gives the film a dated look that occasionally works against a story about technological advances, and distracts from its fleeting but impactful emotional punches. Yet this Spinal Tap -esque approach serves as a constant reminder that BlackBerry is, at heart, a comedy, not a slick drama.

Of course, the BlackBerry’s domination doesn’t last. And in the final act, set in 2007, Mike confidently dismisses the televised presentation in which Steve Jobs announces the iPhone, his denial a telling sign that success has loosened his grip on reality. Baruchel gets to flex a few different muscles here, his anxious mannerisms calcifying into impatience and desperation. It may not be The Social Network , but this kind of human downfall, performed by brilliant comedic actors, is exactly where BlackBerry succeeds: with heart, humour and the occasional hammy flourish.

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BlackBerry Movie Poster: Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton stand in front of a dark background with the image of a BlackBerry device and the title in orange

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 1 Review
Kids Say 0 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Fun dramedy about world's first smartphone has swearing.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 15+?

Frequent use of words including "f--k," "f---ing," "goddamn," "son of a bitch."

The film is about the rise of BlackBerry, so the phone and its features play a c

Confrontations, yelling.

Adults drink alcohol.

Any Positive Content?

Focuses on how business can expose the cracks in a friendship and potentially ru

Mike Lazaridis and Doug show how friendship and a mutual interest in technology

Main cast and key filmmakers are all White men. Some people of color (Asian Amer

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

The film is about the rise of BlackBerry, so the phone and its features play a central role. The iPhone, the BlackBerry's direct competition, is also featured, as is Verizon. The products are referenced as part of the film's story, not necessarily as product endorsements.

Violence & Scariness

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Focuses on how business can expose the cracks in a friendship and potentially ruin it, as well as how people can become corrupted by power and money. While the company behind BlackBerry did rely on teamwork to create the phone, the film focuses more on how the rise of BlackBerry led members of the company to greed. STEM themes related to technology innovation.

Positive Role Models

Mike Lazaridis and Doug show how friendship and a mutual interest in technology can lead to industry disruption. But Mike gets caught up in the corporate life thanks to businessman/BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie, and Jim himself pulls financial trickery to bring BlackBerry to market.

Diverse Representations

Main cast and key filmmakers are all White men. Some people of color (Asian American) among the extras, as well as one White woman.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Parents need to know that BlackBerry is a fact-based dramedy about the rise and fall of the BlackBerry, the world's first smartphone. Expect plenty of swearing ("f--k," "s--t," and much more), as well as a few scenes of adult characters drinking. The film could be interpreted as promoting STEM themes related to technology innovation and can also serve as a morality tale about the dangers of corporate greed. Jay Baruchel , Matt Johnson (who also directed), and Glenn Howerton star. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (1)

Based on 1 parent review

Darkly comedic true story of the first mobile phone

What's the story.

BLACKBERRY follows Mike Lazaridis ( Jay Baruchel ) and Doug Fregin ( Matt Johnson , who also directs), the inventors of the world's first smartphone. Their invention is taken to market by savvy and anger-prone exec Jim Balsillie ( Glenn Howerton ), which leads Mike and Doug down a path that tests their friendship -- and reveals their true goals with the company.

Is It Any Good?

BlackBerry is a funny, insightful dramedy about the smartphone that started it all. While it might start off a bit slowly (à la T he Office ), the film develops its own personality and sense of self the more it brings viewers into the friendship between Mike and Doug. Baruchel in particular convincingly portrays a man who started his business out of friendship and community but grows into someone who's solely focused on the bottom line. Howerton, meanwhile, expertly plays Jim as a classic yuppie who probably needs anger management. Overall, BlackBerry is one of those biopics that can fully entertain as well as inform.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how accurate they think BlackBerry is. Why might filmmakers change the facts in a movie based on a true story? How could you find out more?

Did you notice any positive diverse representations in the film? Why is it important to note when media lacks diversity?

How does the BlackBerry revolutionize the phone industry? What brings about its fall?

How does Mike and Doug's friendship evolve over the course of the film? How is it tested? How does Mike change over the course of the film? Does he change for the worse or for the better?

Movie Details

In theaters : May 12, 2023
On DVD or streaming : June 2, 2023
Cast : Jay Baruchel , Glenn Howerton , Matt Johnson , Michael Ironside
Director : Matt Johnson
Inclusion Information : Female writers
Studio : IFC Films
Genre : Comedy
Topics : STEM , Friendship , History
Run time : 119 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language throughout
Last updated : August 5, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Movie review: 'Speak No Evil' a terrifying couples retreat

When James McAvoy invites you over for the weekend just say no. Photo courtesy of Universal Studios

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 10 (UPI) -- Speak No Evil , in theaters Friday, is one intense thriller. Social pressures turn to true horrors, but both are equally terrifying.

In this remake of the 2022 Danish film, Ben (Scoot McNairy) and Louise (Mackenzie Davis) meet Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) on vacation in Italy. After the trip, Paddy invites the family to his farm. Advertisement

The title is Speak No Evil , so it's not a spoiler to suggest Paddy and Ciara have nefarious intentions. Their initial manipulations are unsettling enough to warrant an entire horror movie.

Paddy is aggressive and judgmental in Italy, especially when Louise reveals she is a vegetarian. He pressures Ben and Louise to let their daughter, Agnes (Alix West Lefler), ride on his Vespa so they can't say no, and scares off an annoying Dutch couple with brash bathroom talk.

This behavior only escalates when Ben, Louise and Agnes are captive on Paddy and Ciara's farm. Their son, Ant (Dan Hough), tries to warn Agnes, but Ant can't talk, so he literally can't speak about the evil.

There are signs of abuse, like bruises on Ciara's body and scars on Ant's. Paddy's sense of humor is abusive, too, joking about beating Ant or having a babysitter deported. Advertisement

Paddy and Ciara share too much about their sex life. The visit is already uncomfortable before it transitions into outright horror.

Writer-director James Watkins maintains the sense of unease throughout Ben and Louise's stay at the farm. Whenever an uncomfortable incident is resolved, Paddy makes it weird again.

Watkins stresses all the psychological pressures Paddy and Ciara put on Ben and Louise. It's psychological torture even before it becomes full-on horror.

There is a theme that parents should really listen to children better. Ben dismisses Agnes for her attachment to a stuffed animal, and everyone dismisses Ant because he can't speak, but the kids are the first to notice the warning signs.

The movie's climax pays off those psychological seeds in an intense and brutal assault. However, the relatable social pressures leading up to that will be scary enough for most audiences. Advertisement

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.

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‘Else’ Review: This Bold Body Horror Film Is TIFF’s Most Trippy Discovery

TIFF 2024: Thibault Emin’s feature follows two individuals grappling with a disease that literally merges them into one being

There is a pretty good chance that a film like “Else,” the fascinating feature debut from director Thibault Emin that’s an extension of his short of the same name, is going to fly under the radar for many. This is a real shame because those who see it will find that not only does this film grow on you, but it burrows inside your very skin. Remaining mostly confined to one apartment as the world falls apart due to an unknown epidemic that’s taking hold, “Else” is a film you watch in a combination of awe and horror. As we see in all its gruesome glory what this disease can do to us, the film takes a plunge into something hauntingly beautiful. It’s a movie about the forces that consume anything and everything to make them into something that is a part of a collective. The more it expands on this, the better it gets, sweeping you up in stunning visuals that swallow you whole.

It’s also more metaphysical in nature, asking questions about the body, the self, where one begins and the other ends, as well as what happens when we let others into our life. It takes us into a world that is far bigger than us and often beyond easy understanding, creating arresting visuals that implant themselves in your mind.

The film, which premiered Monday evening at the Toronto International Film Festival as part of their Midnight Madness programming, follows the woefully awkward Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) who has recently begun an exciting if complicated new relationship with the far more confident and chaotic Cass (Édith Proust). In a script written by Emin, Alice Butaud, and Emma Sandona, we come to understand how the duo’s fundamental differences, while often seeming to be potentially insurmountable, actually work to draw them closer together. This will take on a whole new level of meaning when a previously unknown disease starts causing people to literally merge with whatever is around them. What is first just the two living together in an apartment starts to open up the possibility of living as one with all that this entails.

If this sounds impenetrable, it really isn’t as the film starts out in a rather straightforward narrative fashion. However, formally, it’s anything but normal. Utilizing often discomforting close-ups and spectacular sound design, we’re locked into the duo’s confined world. Their relatively new relationship is believable while still making clear they’re fundamentally different people in an almost profound sense, ensuring the erasure of the borders between them feels like a way of tearing apart our preconceived notions of what one can be. The flesh and blood we think of as being set in stone are more malleable, as if we’re tiny pieces of clay to be squished together. The more it explores this, the more the film takes bigger swings that keep connecting with something new, challenging us to keep looking even as what we observe may be painful.

Though the performances by its two leads deliver, the film really kicks into another gear when the more visceral yet vibrant body horror comes to the forefront. You can see the passion in every frame and disquietingly constructed effect that makes you question how Emin pulled it off. There is some regrettable yet thankfully brief futzing around with AI that’s noticeable early on (not the first film to do so, as “ Late Night With the Devil ” will remind you), but it’s the handcrafted stuff that leaves a mark. When the film shifts in style, adopting a black-and-white color palette as everything starts to merge together, is where it comes alive just as there is the potential the lovers could both soon perish.

Yet both stick together as they remain the only ones caring about the fundamental alteration that is coming for them. At the same time, while they’re alone in the apartment, there are others in their building, all of whom are increasingly starting to experience the symptoms of merging with things. Whatever warning this may give, it can’t save our two characters from the same fate. There is a beauty in that on a thematic level, as it’s about coming to accept that things are about to forever change, but on a purely visual level, the film is just profoundly breathtaking to behold. It immerses us into the strange details while also pulling back for striking wide shots that let us soak up all the ways that this new world being born is something uniquely, terrifyingly alive.

When the old and new are brought crashing together, the already transcendent and thrilling film becomes eerily contemplative in a stunning conclusion, breaking free of any and all boundaries. Whether you’re taken over by its vision will depend on how willing you are to open your mind to it, but it’s worth doing so many times over. Just beware when entering into it: you don’t know what pieces of you may be left behind and what you’ll take with you that wasn’t there before.

The Substance is a grotesque takedown of our obsession with youth

Director coralie fargeat’s the substance goes full david cronenberg body horror with a gruesome parable about the violence of youth-obsessed beauty standards..

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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A woman in a black catsuit holding a class cup and standing in front of an array of floor-to-ceiling windows.

As much as studios love hyping up their latest scary movies as being so terrifying that they traumatize audiences, it is rare for features to live up to that kind of buzz. But The Substance writer / director Coralie Fargeat’s new body horror is infinitely more disturbing (a feature, not a bug) than any of its early trailers have let on.

Films about the agony of living up to female beauty standards aren’t new, but The Substance weaves them into an incisive feminist parable that feels jacked directly into the moment that has given us on-demand Ozempic and Brat . And what the film lacks in subtlety, it makes up for with an inspired — if stomach-turning — story that’s meant to get all the way under your skin, no matter how secure in your body you might feel.

After years of hosting her popular aerobics TV show, fitness icon Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) has almost everything she’s ever dreamed of. She’s wealthy, famous, and her face is plastered all over Los Angeles, where her name has become synonymous with the overt sexiness of her long-running series. On the day Elisabeth turns 50, though, her piggish boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) informs her that her time with the studio is coming to an end. He insists that Elisabeth’s dismissal is just a consequence of viewers’ changing tastes in programming, but she knows that it’s her age.

Elisabeth understands how, especially in show business, women can become personae non gratae the moment men in power decide they’re no longer physically desirable. And the reality that she’s being sunsetted alarms Elisabeth so much that she barely thinks twice when presented with the opportunity to try a mysterious drug that promises to transform her into a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of herself. The Substance works, and Elisabeth gives a twisted kind of birth to Sue (Margaret Qualley) — a gorgeous 20-something whose looks send men into cartoonish fits. But as happy as Elisabeth initially is with her secret double life, she soon finds herself at odds with Sue as “they” struggle to follow the strict rules about how The Substance is supposed to be used.

It doesn’t take many licks to get through The Substance ’s glossy candy coating down to its powerful message about the way society pushes women to aspire and conform to unrealistic ideas of femininity. The Substance repeatedly explains that Elisabeth and Sue are the same person and must alternate between physical forms for a week at a time in order to remain stable. The conceit itself is an effective metaphor for the way that our youth-obsessed culture drives people to drastically alter themselves with drugs, cosmetic surgeries, and extreme lifestyle changes that all come with some degree of risk.

It’s excruciating to watch The Substance ’s visceral shots of skin being ripped apart and bodily fluids being drained through twisted tubing. But as Sue steps out into the world, Fargeat presents it as a wonderland of sex and power intoxicating enough to make the pain of her transformation worth it. Though The Substance features a handful of other characters, Moore and Qualley command the film with dueling performances. Together, they paint a complex picture of a woman at war with herself for control of a life that they’re both responsible for but have drastically different experiences of.

Moore brings a desperate weariness to Elisabeth, whose status as a spandex-wearing fitness icon reads as a nod to the actor’s rise to fame in the early ’80s. And there’s a sociopathic quality to the way Qualley inhabits Sue as a woman merely playing at being a guileless “girl next door” type to befuddle boorish men. As the drug continues to open more and more doors for Sue that were once closed to Elisabeth, The Substance begins to echo many of the beats that shaped All About Eve while channeling a dark eroticism evocative of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls . But as Elisabeth and Sue’s fight for control over their life becomes more pointed, the movie drives head-on into territory reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s Crash and Crimes of the Future , which Fargeat makes her own with buckets of artfully splattered viscera.

While there’s a pronounced comedy streak running through it, The Substance is not at all a movie for the squeamish. Many of its most stunning scenes are soaked in blood spurting from unnatural orifices and bodies becoming warped in nightmarish ways. They’re spectacularly nauseating. Fargeat wants you to feel the fantasy and witness the suffering that comes with trying to maintain it. The Substance might very well leave you feeling sick and a little woozy, but that’s how you know it’s working.

The Substance also stars Hugo Diego Garcia, Philip Schurer, Joseph Balderrama, Tom Morton, and Robin Greer. The film hits theaters on September 20th.

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Iphone 16 pro and 16 pro max hands-on: don’t call it a shutter button, sony announces the $700 ps5 pro with a larger gpu, advanced ray tracing, and ai upscaling, apple announces the iphone 16 with a faster processor and camera control button, apple’s iphone 16 event: the 8 biggest announcements.

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You only have one day to watch 2024’s most adorable anime movie in theaters

There are cute animals wearing tiny business suits, but also poignant musings on connection

by Petrana Radulovic

One of the most delightful moments in Production I.G.’s feature-length anime movie The Concierge involves a very nervous ferret businessman wearing a wee little suit. He’s visiting a fancy department store, because he’s entertaining two of his company’s most prestigious clients: a tiny owl and his wife, both wearing smart jackets for their shopping trip. Mr. Ferret wants to show them a good time, since the owl could give his company some good work. So he enlists the help of the department store’s newest concierge, a human who must crouch down in order to see eye-to-eye with the small animals.

Seeing a cute animal fretting about such a human concern is so endearing — as is the fact that the concierge is bending over backwards (sometimes literally) to help out a tiny ferret. And that isn’t even the most special element of this movie, which will be in American theaters for one day only, on Sept. 11.

A glamorous white sea mink in a fashionable black hate and sunglassess

Based on Tsuchika Nishimura’s manga series The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store , The Concierge was adapted for the screen by director Yoshimi Itazu ( The Deer King ) and screenwriter Satomi Ôshima ( Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko ). The setup is simple: A young woman named Akino (Natsumi Kawaida) becomes a concierge for a department store that caters to animals. Her job involves making sure all of the customers’ needs are met — especially the Very Important Animal customers, creatures that are extinct in the wild, like sea minks and Japanese wolves . Akino is determined to do a good job, but she’s anxious about the possibility of messing up.

If you’re looking for some deeper explanation for why these animals wear clothes and conduct themselves like humans, don’t bother. The movie includes some ruminations on how lonely some of the extinct animals must be, and how the department store exists as a refuge for them, but there’s no significant world-building or information about how the rest of this world works. That’s entirely OK, though, because it’s such a sublime world to witness as it unfolds on screen.

A woman in a smart blue uniform crouches down to see eye-to-eye with a tiny mouse customer

The animation is simple and colorful, really emphasizing the animal characters’ distinct shapes and design. They all have unique ways of moving and interacting with the setting, from the great auk who requires a little push so he can slide across the glistening floors to the giant woolly mammoth whose heft makes the elevator run slower. Akino makes sure to bend down to talk to the smaller animals, especially after a disastrous moment during her first day, where she almost steps on a few of the store’s tiniest customers, including a mole, a bunny, and a mama duck with her ducklings.

The movie is episodic, with Akino helping different animal customers and bouncing around the department store. But there’s more connective thread than just some stitched-up episodes or chapters, especially as Akino grows more self-assured and uses what she’s learned from previous clients to help her new ones.

Seeing Akino’s confidence blossom throughout the movie is gratifying. And as she grows into her role, she’s more emboldened about really connecting with her clients. There’s a soft plot thread about interpersonal (inter… animal?) connection weaving throughout The Concierge ; it’s subtle at first, but by the time the movie finishes, it’s at the forefront, a slow build of emotions that all coalesces wonderfully at the end. It’s a heartwarming, surprisingly poignant, movie that also makes its point by putting a variety of animals into natty human clothes.

Crunchyroll will premier e The Concierge in American theaters for a one-day-only special showing on Sept. 11. Polygon will update this post when Crunchyroll announces a streaming date for the movie.

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Hallmark+ Review

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Hallmark+ is a cable-free subscription service that offers thousands of hours of Hallmark’s signature feel-good programming in the form of movies and ongoing series. Nearly all media found on the service is exclusive to the Hallmark brand, created either specifically for Hallmark+, or pulled from another source such as Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Mystery, or Hallmark Family. The service can be added as a channel to Prime Video.

Hallmark+ News

We tested Hallmark+ and other subscription streaming services for more than 100 hours. Hallmark+ is compatible with Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Roku, Android TV, iPhone/iPad, Android Phone/Tablet, Mac, Windows, LG Smart TV, Samsung Smart TV, Sony Smart TV, and VIZIO Smart TV.

Nearly all content on Hallmark+ is original. While the service does provide series, original content primarily comes in the form of feature films. These range from originals created by the service itself, to other originals created and owned by other branches of Hallmark, including the Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Hall of Fame, and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. These movies include Cup of Love (2016) , Changing Hearts (2012) , Darrow & Darrow: In the Key of Murder (2018) , Can You Feel Me Dancing (1986) , and hundreds more.

In addition to movies, Hallmark+ also does share the episodic content from other Hallmark sources, such as the Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Hall of Fame, and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. To name a few, this includes Cedar Cove (2013) , Heartland (2007) , Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye (2002) , and Chesapeake Shores (2016) .

The real draw for Hallmark+ is the plethora of Hallmark feature films it offers. Take your pick from literal hundreds of choices, and be whisked away on an uplifting journey. Here you can find movies like Crossroads - A Story of Forgiveness (2007) , Cupid & Cate (2000) , Journey of the Heart (1997) , Kiss at Pine Lake (2012) , and tons more.

What to Watch on Hallmark+

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Hallmark Movies Now allows you to install the app on up to five devices on one account.

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Hallmark+ allows you to watch certain content when traveling internationally.

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720p HD (Up to 1080p HD)

Most video streams are in 720p HD. Some video streams are available in 1080p HD.

Most video streams in 30 FPS, with some available in 60 FPS.

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Content has stereo audio.

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'Speak No Evil' Review: Blumhouse's Horror Remake Talks a Lot But Says Nothing

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The horror genre is filled to the brim with English-language remakes of horror films , and most are inferior to their foreign original. Quarantine fails to capture the gritty reality of Spain’s Rec and The Uninvited doesn’t compare to the South Korean A Tale of Two Sisters . But then sometimes you get a master director helming a shot-for-shot remake of their own film like Michael Haneke 's Funny Games or a genuinely decent English-language adaptation like The Ring . These English-language horror films aren’t bad by any means, but still, if you had to choose between the two versions, more often than not, the original is going to come out on top. Remaking a movie, no matter if it’s decades or just two years since the original’s release, feels like it’s putting the remake at a disadvantage before it’s even shown in theaters .

This trend is still alive and well, as Blumhouse didn’t skip a beat when the 2022 co-production between Denmark and the Netherlands, Speak No Evil , was released to rave reviews from critics and horror fans alike. It’s a brutal, excruciating, and relentless look at human nature and how polite society and the need for interpersonal connection can be our greatest downfall. 2024’s English-language remake, helmed by James Watkins and produced by Jason Blum under his famed horror house, talks the same talk as the original, but while the 2022 version shouted and roared, this version doesn’t so much as whisper in comparison.

What Is 'Speak No Evil' About?

Ben ( Scoot McNairy ) and Louise ( Makenzie Davis in a stand-out performance) are an American couple struggling to adapt to life in London. They take their 11-year-old daughter Agnes ( Alix West Lefler ) on a holiday to Italy, forcing themselves to believe that their easy access to Europe is reason enough to stay in the UK. They cross paths with the loud, obnoxious, but jovial British family consisting of Paddy ( James McAvoy doing a caricature of his Split role), Ciara ( Aisling Franciosi ), and their son, Ant ( Dan Hough ), who has a disease that causes him to have a much smaller tongue, leaving him unable to speak.

It’s clear right away that Ben is jealous of their easygoing approach to life, and the couple is equally seduced by Paddy and Ciara's careless and hedonistic ways as they are made uncomfortable by their blatant lack of common social cues. A few weeks later, Ben and Louise receive a postcard to their London flat from the other couple, inviting them to their secluded home in the English countryside for a weekend of food, drink, walks, and the celebration of new friends. Louise is hesitant but sees it could benefit Ben, whose inability to find a new job has left him depressed, and they agree to go.

Right from the outset, the couple’s new friends are much stranger than they remember . Paddy is even more obnoxious and unpleasant, forcing Louise to try the goose they shot especially for the weekend, even though Louise has said she’s a vegetarian. Ciara fails to tell Ben and Louise that a man who barely speaks English will be babysitting the children. When the children are alone, Ant is desperate to tell Agnes something , but he can’t due to his speech impediment. He shows Agnes his father’s array of watches, one with an inscription in a foreign language. When Ciara and Paddy’s behavior crosses further boundaries, they always seem to have some traumatic backstory to explain it. But when Paddy starts verbally abusing his son in front of their guests, and Ant is finally able to communicate his distress to Agnes, Ben and Louise realize that their new friends are something much darker than just two assholes who don’t know how to socialize properly.

Blumhouse's Remake of 'Sleep No Evil' Doesn't Compare to the Devastating Original

While every film deserves to be analyzed for its own merits and failures, it’s impossible to critique this version without comparing it to the original. After all, the film justifies its existence on whether it can live up to the original or at least add something new to the story. This can be easy when you’re remaking a movie for a new generation, but the original Speak No Evil only came out two years ago. The only difference is the language, but even in that, a major portion of the original is spoken in English, as the couples are from different countries, and English is their only common language.

speak-no-evil-Mackenzie-Davis-James-McAvoy

The 7 Things You Need To Know About James McAvoy's 'Speak No Evil' Remake

James McAvoy and Mackenzie Davis star in this psychological nightmare.

If anything, the fact that every character in this version speaks English takes away from the tension and gap between the characters. In the 2022 version, Bjørn ( Morten Burian ), Louise ( Sidsel Siem Koch ), and Agnes ( Liva Forsberg ) are able to communicate with each other in their native Danish without Patrick ( Fedja van Huêt ) and Karin ( Karina Smulders ) understanding, letting us in on their secrets and fears. No subtitles are offered when Patrick and Karin speak in Dutch, further alienating them from the audience. In short, there really was no reason for an American remake . The Danish film is absolutely perfect and one of the most devastating horror films in recent memory. How on earth do you follow that up?

2024's 'Speak No Evil' Lacks Atmosphere and Tension

C Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) sit outside in Speak No Evil.

A major reason the original works so well is that it creates an overwhelming sense of tension and a hopeless atmosphere. This is noticeably lacking in Blumhouse’s version, and a lot of the foreboding and sense of fear is put on McAvoy’s shoulders. The first film will have you feeling like you’re watching the ending of Argo , but for the entire runtime, whilst here, you’re not really convinced that Paddy and Ciara are all that evil until the film becomes a disappointingly predictable home invasion movie. This isn’t a rarity for Blumhouse’s recent slate of movies , as most of them put no work into building a growing sense of unease or urgency , letting the horror simmer in the audience and toy with them until it’s time to bubble over. In Watkin’s film, like so many of its contemporaries, the atmosphere is ice-cold until it goes straight to boiling point, which results in a tonal imbalance that makes the action of the climax feel unearned. Don’t expect to be scared by the remake; while Watkins certainly litters his film with action and horror trademarks, they don’t amount to any sense of fear or terror.

Speaking of the climax, that is what makes the original such a hopeless and gut-wrenching film. It’s not surprising that Blumhouse would butcher the story to offer a classical Hollywood ending, but it’s still disappointing. If there is anything this version does somewhat better, it’s that it does make Ben and Louise much more empathetic characters . While the shoehorned-in backstory is another eye-roll predictable trope, as horror films these days just can’t get enough of broken families coming back together in the face of immediate danger, it does make this family’s nightmarish predictable rather than a bit more compelling.

Makenzie Davis Gives a Standout Performance in 'Speak No Evil'

Makenzie Davis as Louise Dalton in Speak No Evil 2024

The cast of Speak No Evil is its greatest asset. While the marketing material may have you think this is a showcase for James McAvoy to do some more maniacal scenery-chewing, Mackenzie Davis’ performance holds the entire film together. While the film has her to be the Virgin Mary perfect mother, taking away the nuances of parenthood that we see in the Danish version, her primal instinct and protection of her family makes us root for her. Scoot McNairy fits into the “man on a journey to find his inner cowboy” perfectly, and their power dynamics are the one refreshing aspect of the film.

James McAvoy is one of the most talented and charming performers working today, and he’s more than proved himself a worthy horror villain, but his performance here doesn’t match what is asked of the character. He’s meant to be a psychopath hiding behind a facade of pleasantries and camaraderie, but it ends up making Paddy sound like every bro you’ve been stuck talking to at a wedding; his infernal pontificating about social media and humans' overreliance on technology makes him more into an annoying pick-me guy rather than a terrifying horror villain. Aisling Franciosi’s performance is the most similar to her original counterpart, balancing an act of insidious enabling and aloof disassociation.

All in all, it's not that much of a surprise that a Danish-Dutch original story that is free of the confines of the Hollywood system is exponentially better than a hastily made Blumhouse production. If you want to give the 2024 film as fair a shot as possible, go in without seeing the original. However, if you only want to devote your time to seeing one version of this story, it should be the original Speak No Evil . It's truly one of the darkest, meanest, and most devastating horror films out there, similar to Michael Haneke's Funny Games , with no rhyme nor reason given to ordinary, nice people being subjected to unthinkable acts of violence. Blumhouse's attempt watches like a sterile and hollow rehashing of the outline of a story that's already been done perfectly.

Speak No Evil (2024)

Blumhouse's Speak No Evil fails to reach the devastating heights of the fantastic original.

Makenzie Davis gives a committed and empathetic performance as a woman dedicated to protecting her family.
The film noticeably lacks the excruciating mood and atmosphere of the first film, with very little scares and blood.
The change of the ending takes away from why the original's story was so effective, giving into predictable Hollywood tropes.
James McAvoy's Paddy isn't a foreboding villain, making his presence more annoying than terrifying.

Speak No Evil hits theaters on September 13.

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