“BlackBerry” belongs to an expanding tradition of biopics concerning the pioneer of an app or doodad that streamlined society, or captured its imagination, at the potential cost of its soul. Call it a new kind of “Picture of Dorian Gray” narrative that shows what the ability to breathe media as oxygen has done to us.
“The Social Network” is the father of this subgenre, with movies like “Steve Jobs” and miniseries like “The Dropout” following in its wake. Compared to those productions, “BlackBerry” is a humble, low-stakes entertainment, and that’s not a bad thing. Rather than trying to turn his film’s central geeks into a social metaphor or a modern Icarus, co-writer/co-star-director Matt Johnson sees them as, well, geeks, who had an idea that led to a culture-quake.
Adapting Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book, “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry,” Johnson fashions a propulsive comic character study. He’s less interested in a Big Picture than in the micro textures of tech innovation, from the initial inspiration to production to the hustling required to keep a project going, which also suggest the pressures associated with film production. Johnson doesn’t indulge in heavy-handed contextualizing. There’s no hero worship, no masturbatory speeches in the key of Aaron Sorkin about what everything might mean. Johnson seems to be saying: Here was a thing that was a big deal in the early aughts for a while until a bigger thing—the iPhone—changed the game again. To encounter such cut-and-dried simplicity in a pretentious genre is refreshing.
When a movie is about someone who made a lot of money doing something momentous, the filmmakers usually cannot contain their salivating, even if said movies are positioned as cautionary tales. This is an area where films court tedium, as they must pretend that most of us aren’t enthralled with money and don’t love watching selfish visionaries screw people over for their own whims. Moralizing is boring and no one believes it, anyway—that’s why people tune out of politics too. Every once in a while, a filmmaker has the balls to admit that money and power are amoral and often destructive and intoxicating. In “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Martin Scorsese reveled in his hero’s avarice so thoroughly that an ironic breakthrough was achieved: you actually began to feel the moral need for self-control, without the fakeness of platitudes.
“BlackBerry” walks the walk and talks the talk too, in an opposing way. Johnson appears to be authentically indifferent to money, especially in terms of gratifying the audience’s fantasies. When the creators of BlackBerry get rich, he doesn’t drink in their new status and bling, and he doesn’t congratulate himself for not reveling in it either. This indifference suggests a rare quality in movies: innocence, which frees “BlackBerry” of hypocrisy. When the movie rues the phone’s fall from revolutionary and personal object to piece of junk being mass-produced overseas, the sentiment feels earned.
What Johnson responds to is nerd culture. He likes the tactility of the BlackBerry, which shows its roots as having been forged from the parts of other gadgets. A phone with a little typewriter keyboard—it’s cute, and, for the record, I also miss buttons on devices. He likes ephemera, pop cultural artifacts, which is not unusual in our modern nostalgia age, but he has a light touch. We’re allowed to see the “Star Trek” arcana for ourselves and recognize that the BlackBerry probably began as a version of sci-fi cosplay.
Johnson has a nerd’s interest in the exhilaration of figuring out a problem, and an actual stake in community. He actually cares about how the Canadian pioneers of BlackBerry, Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson), figured out a server issue that was holding back the smartphone. Johnson shows more interest in Fregin’s rotation of movie T-shirts than he does in the growing capital of his heroes. And Johnson finds the dissolution of “movie night,” when the nerds get together to eat popcorn out of coffee filters and watch classics like John Carpenter’s “They Live,” viscerally heartbreaking. This guy might not have David Fincher’s formal chops, but I’m betting he’d be more fun to have lunch with, and he doesn’t turn his actors into metronomes.
Johnson’s images may lack Fincher’s sculptural sleekness, but he has a flair for casual, livewire staging and pacing that allows actors’ personalities to ricochet off one another. “BlackBerry” and the recent “Pinball” suggest that certain filmmakers understand how lifelessly pretty images dominated by the contributions of a production department can bring a movie to a halt, especially biographies. Running two full hours, “BlackBerry” has a shaggy warmth and zippiness that your weekly blockbuster should envy, and it doesn’t lose its comic pulse even when Lazaridis begins to cut corners and run afoul of his growing ego, as egged on by his embittered co-CEO, Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton).
I’ve enjoyed the FX show “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” but have never been hungry to see its stars outside of that world—a preconception seemingly vindicated by the performances of Charlie Day. If “BlackBerry” establishes Johnson as someone to watch, it also suggests life after “Sunny” for Howerton, who can turn rage into a caustically funny fashion statement. Howerton’s trick is that he can satirize his character while honoring the volcanic majesty of the rage itself. In other words, he has perspective without turning into a cartoon or even a blowhard celebration of machismo. Think Alec Baldwin’s character in the film of “Glengarry Glen Ross” as played by Jason Alexander as George Costanza and you’re close to what Howerton is doing. It’s a major comic performance almost predestined to be taken for granted. Don’t make that mistake.
Jalmari Helander’s “Sisu” has been earning raves from critics, who are positioning it as the alt-weekly antidote to more mainstream kill-o-ramas like the “John Wick” series. I can’t for the life of me understand why. It’s a dull, repetitive, underimagined movie, the wilted salad bar to the sloppy, five-course Italian dinner that is “John Wick 4.”
There are few things more tedious than a wannabe cult movie. Cuteness and self-consciousness can very easily set in, as they do here. During the last days of World War II, a miner called Aatami (Jorma Tommila) runs afoul of Nazis in retreat, who’re running a scorched earth campaign across Finland. They steal his gold and he kills them all, as he is invincible and has a very particular set of skills. The references to other movies are predictable. There’s the shout-out to Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” that appears in every movie of this sort. A plot point with imprisoned women recalls similar business in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which is evoked in other ways too. There’s a callback to “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which, come to think of it, “BlackBerry” references as well.
What “Sisu” does not have is a hero or a villain with a personality. Tommila is deeply anonymous—a mistake considering that the movie is built around him. The head Nazi is played by Aksel Hennie, who resembles Mads Mikkelsen, making you wish that you were watching him instead. Worry not: Mads will strap on Nazi drag for the forthcoming “Indiana Jones” movie. It may be tempting to watch, say, a “John Wick” or a “Taken” or an “Equalizer” and assume that the movies are interchangeable and that stars don’t matter. Stars don’t necessarily matter, but actors with charisma do.
Everything about “Sisu” feels drab and secondhand. The action scenes are competent without being clever. The squibs explode on cue but there’s nothing poetic or disturbing about the violence. It’s just there. The film is divided into chapters to mask the fact that not much is going on, and because it’s cool when Quentin Tarantino movies do it.
It’s also difficult to overstate how profoundly overdone Nazis are as villains. They have been the de facto shorthand for evil for decades, and sometimes you want to remind filmmakers that other empires have committed genocide. They are EVIL in all caps and allow audiences to complacently consume violence, guilt-free. Nazis allow everyone else to dodge complicity for their own actions or blood lusts. But mostly Nazis are dramatically easy. Too easy. Even in genre films, death shouldn’t come this cheap.
“Sisu” is now playing in theaters. “BlackBerry” opens in theaters May 11th.
