BlackBerry

Tagline : Work hard. Fail hard.

Runtime : 119 mins

Genre : Drama Comedy History

Vote Rating : 7.2/10

Budget : 5 million $ USD

Revenue : 2.6 million $ USD


Movie Website


Reviews for this movie are available below.

Plot : Two mismatched entrepreneurs – egghead innovator Mike Lazaridis and cut-throat businessman Jim Balsillie – joined forces in an endeavour that was to become a worldwide hit in little more than a decade. The story of the meteoric rise and catastrophic demise of the world's first smartphone.

Cast Members

Disclaimer - This is a news site. All the information listed here is to be found on the web elsewhere. We do not host, upload or link to any video, films, media file, live streams etc. Kodiapps is not responsible for the accuracy, compliance, copyright, legality, decency, or any other aspect of the content streamed to/from your device. We are not connected to or in any other way affiliated with Kodi, Team Kodi, or the XBMC Foundation. We provide no support for third party add-ons installed on your devices, as they do not belong to us. It is your responsibility to ensure that you comply with all your regional legalities and personal access rights regarding any streams to be found on the web. If in doubt, do not use.
DMCA Policy
- Privacy Policy
Kodiapps app v7.0 - Available for Android. You can now add latest scene releases to your collection with Add to Trakt. More features and updates coming to this app real soon.
Tip : Add https://kodiapps.com/rss to your RSS Ticker in System/Appearance/Skin settings to get the very latest Movie & TV Show release info delivered direct to your Kodi Home Screen. Builders are free to use it for their builds too.
You can get all the latest TV Shows & Movies release news direct to your Twitter. Never miss your fave TV Shows & Movies again. Send a follower request via the social media link.

Reviews

Matt Johnson's rather John McEnroe-esque "Doug" rather stole this tale of what was literally a tech-tonic shift in how we used our mobile phones. He, together with his boss Mike (Jay Baruchel), has been working with a small team of geeks to develop a mobile word processor that can send messages by text and email. It's funding they lack and it's during a fairly flawed presentation that they encounter "Jim" (Glenn Howerton), a savvy operator who knows just enough about the business to get them that elusive big deal. Thing is, they don't think they have the processing capacity to service this ever increasing share of the market even if their new pal is generating eye-watering business opportunities. A 46% market share of what became the exponentially burgeoning smartphone market offered them real potential to dominate for years - but history tells us just what did happen. This film benefits from not really having a big star at the helm. The three men juggle the pressures, successes and failures delivering a solid and at times quite funny story of the rise and falls of a company that, when faced with difficulties, resorted to an emergency movie night! It doesn't shy away from depicting some of the sharper practices at play in this supremely competitive business, but it delivers in a far less aggressive fashion. Maybe it's a Canadian thing, but I found myself actually wanting them to succeed (even if I actually ended up loathing my own "Crackberry"). So many of these true stories are based on characters seeking easy money - this is based on a pair of guys who actually made something; and something that set a benchmark for kit we all use across the world without a second thought nowadays. Enjoyable to watch and worth two hours of your time.

“Blackberry” is a film about the failure and spectacular collapse of the world’s first smart phone. Adapting Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry” for the screen, director Matt Johnson creates an entertaining look at contemporary history with his tale of the rise and fall of a revolutionary gadget that changed the world forever. In this unconventional story of modern business failure at the hands of fraud and greed, the film tells the history of Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), the two men responsible for the creation and marketing of the BlackBerry smart phone. It was one of the first of its kind, featuring a pocket device (with a keyboard) that could be used for calls, texts and e-mail messaging. It was a revolutionary idea that was dismissed by many of the major players, until Balsillie saw a massive opportunity in the product and the nerdy co-founders of the company. Lazaridis and his partner Doug (Johnson) lacked business savvy and the know-how to deal with the sharks who dominated the world of corporate technology, and Balsillie became the pitbull they needed to whip the business into shape and bring in the discipline needed to run a tight, successful company. The film takes viewers through the BlackBerry timeline from concept to eventual defeat, starting in 1996 up until 2016. The mid-nineties seems like a time that was so far away, but it wasn’t that long ago. (Being transported back to a world without a smart phone in every pocket is nearly unimaginable nowadays). The film has a retro look and feel that’s very corporate and drab, which is a great fit for the material, and Johnson’s storytelling is comprehensive but always entertaining, with a good mix of business-oriented drama and light comedy. The most interesting parts of the story are when PalmPilot CEO Carl Yankowski (Cary Elwes) hints at a hostile takeover, but Balsillie outthinks him by launching a grassroots marketing campaign that made the Blackberry a highly sought after status symbol. He saved the company, which makes for an eventual bittersweet demise. On the other hand, he also directly led to its end with some shady stock manipulation that got him in trouble with the SEC. The film is well cast with standout work from Baruchel, especially when he begins to crack with the realization that Apple is getting ready to kill his invention and his company with their upcoming iPhone, a product with the highest consumer interest of any item in history. The characters are flawed human beings (and in the case of Balsillie, a total jerk), but they aren’t impossible to root for. Ultimately a reflection on failure, “BlackBerry” is an interesting and fun film about the competitiveness of Silicon Valley and the men who made some massive mistakes on their journey to the top. Their position at the highest rung of the tech world was brief, crippled by the innovators at Apple. By: Louisa Moore

The script seems to be written mostly from the perspective of Jim Balsillie, a businessman that was co-CEO of Blackberry, while engineers take a backseat. This follows the general tendency in film to glorify businessmen, treating the people who actually conceptualize, design and implement the products (i.e., do the core work that is societally useful) as mere sidekicks. The general timeline is right and many of the major events in the history of Blackberry are there, but none are described in enough detail for viewers to appreciate the engineering successes that led to Blackberry rising to global prominence, nor the business mismanagement that tanked it. The engineering details that made it in are often confused or misleading (e.g., Blackberry did not invent push messaging, and their prototype wasn't pulled from thin air overnight). It gives the impression most of the source material came from interviews with non-technical people, or else "Great Man" personality drama was the only material the filmmakers understood well enough to put in a script. The film has confusingly mixed messaging. It perpetuates the notion that engineers are tinkering children that get nothing done without big daddy managers pushing them to work long hours and "just make it work", damn the technical details! Yet it repeatedly also tries to show the businessmen as hustlers that use bluster and hand waving to cover up their general uselessness and technical incompetence, as well as the resulting harmful decisions they make that ultimately resulted in the downfall of Blackberry. Perhaps the writers wanted to portray Balsillie as a clever shark, but based on his actions in the film alone you would think he was largely a egomaniacal leech that the meek engineers could not figure out how to get rid of. Indeed it is unclear why the engineers brought him on to begin with - they probably would have been better off without him and the other businessmen he brought on.

I kept hearing people say this movie was actually not bad for a movie about BalckBerry, and you know what, they were right! Glenn Howerton plays an incredibly entertaining psycho as always. Jay Baruchel does the befuddled muppet thing with aplomb. And then the doofus sidekick guy who's actually more insightful than others give him credit for also does a good job. It's an easy mindless entertainment watch. Spoiler alert, the company does really well then it doesn't.

In one sense, this is a comedic action film. In another sense, it's a biopic of a lying, cheating, ruthless, tech businessman of a slightly less rank than Bezos, Zuckerberg and the "Don't be Evil" Page/Brin team. Overall, it's brilliantly cast and paced. It moves along at the perfect clip for this kind of action film. I was interested in the technology, but that truly wasn't the story.

With the release of such innovative communications products as the Apple and Android smartphones, questions began to circulate about the future viability of onetime market leader BlackBerry, a line of devices that subsequently went into rapid decline. Ironically, that real-life business world narrative itself raises comparable questions about the viability of a movie that tells the BlackBerry story. Nevertheless, writer-director Matt Johnson’s third feature outing brings the ill-fated account of the rise and fall of this Canadian-made smartphone company in the global telecommunications marketplace. Seeing how the company was run, however, it probably shouldn’t come as any surprise why it ultimately failed – shady financial management, ego-driven unbridled greed, undisciplined employees and constant managerial scrambling to remain competitive, despite some surprisingly savvy marketing aimed at making the BlackBerry an enviable status symbol, especially among business clients. But is this kind of material really sufficiently engaging for a feature film? I sure don’t think so, especially since it’s about a company and product that ultimately flopped. It’s a cinematic exercise akin to “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” (1971) trying to take on Silicon Valley giants. The film also gets exceedingly technical at times, making for a film that cyber nerds may find awesomely cool but that casual viewers are likely to see as tedious and confusing. And, by the picture’s second half, with the handwriting on the wall and the parade of unending snafus continuing, it’s difficult to maintain interest in how events unfold and eventually play out. To its credit, this release features some fine performances, most notably by Saul Rubinek, Michael Ironside and Independent Spirit Award nominee Glenn Howerton, as well as an excellent and often-ironic soundtrack. However, in a larger sense, “BlackBerry” also represents a somewhat disconcerting trend in movies that’s gaining traction – films based on the back stories of products and businesses. Besides this offering, 2023 also saw the release of films about sneakers (“Air”), videogame retailing (“Dumb Money”) and even snack foods (“Flamin’ Hot”). While there’s nothing inherently wrong with pictures about business and commerce, these offerings are innately little more than two-hour feature-length commercials for their wares. Indeed, are these commodities becoming our new screen idols? It calls to mind actor Paul Newman’s observation years ago about the emergence of a robot and a shark becoming our new movie icons, but, as different as they were, even they weren’t as shamelessly commercial as these new contenders are. Releases like this should indeed give us all pause to think about what kinds of movies we want to plunk down our hard-earned money to watch.

The downfall part is a bit sudden as compared to the first 2/3 of the film, but still a very fun watch.

Similar Movies

Gandhi

In the early years of the 20th century, Mohandas K. Gandhi, a British-trained lawyer, forsakes all worldly possessions to take up the cause of Indian independence. Faced with armed resistance from the British government, Gandhi adopts a policy of 'passive resistance', endeavouring to win freedom for his people without resorting to bloodshed.

Closely Watched Trains

At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Oblivious to the war and the resistance that surrounds him, this young man embarks on a journey of sexual awakening and self-discovery, encountering a universe of frustration, eroticism, and adventure within his sleepy backwater depot.

Cruel Intentions

Slaking a thirst for dangerous games, Kathryn challenges her stepbrother, Sebastian, to deflower their headmaster's daughter before the summer ends. If he succeeds, the prize is the chance to bed Kathryn. But if he loses, Kathryn will claim his most prized possession.

Lolita

Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged British novelist who is both appalled by and attracted to the vulgarity of American culture. When he comes to stay at the boarding house run by Charlotte Haze, he soon becomes obsessed with Lolita, the woman's teenaged daughter.

Rosemarys Baby

A young couple, Rosemary and Guy, moves into an infamous New York apartment building, known by frightening legends and mysterious events, with the purpose of starting a family.

Animal Farm

Animals on a farm lead a revolution against the farmers to put their destiny in their own hands. However this revolution eats their own children and they cannot avoid corruption.

The Bridge on the River Kwai

The classic story of English POWs in Burma forced to build a bridge to aid the war effort of their Japanese captors. British and American intelligence officers conspire to blow up the structure, but Col. Nicholson, the commander who supervised the bridge's construction, has acquired a sense of pride in his creation and tries to foil their plans.

2046

Women enter and exit a science fiction author's life over the course of a few years after the author loses the woman he considers his one true love.

Black Hawk Down

When U.S. Rangers and an elite Delta Force team attempt to kidnap two underlings of a Somali warlord, their Black Hawk helicopters are shot down, and the Americans suffer heavy casualties, facing intense fighting from the militia on the ground.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

'Toon star Roger is worried that his wife Jessica is playing pattycake with someone else, so the studio hires detective Eddie Valiant to snoop on her. But the stakes are quickly raised when Marvin Acme is found dead and Roger is the prime suspect.

Dangerous Liaisons

In 18th century France, Marquise de Merteuil asks her ex-lover Vicomte de Valmont to seduce the future wife of another ex-lover of hers in return for one last night with her. Yet things don’t go as planned.