#People smart search movie#

Research in Motion - led by a nervous but good-intentioned engineer Mike Lazaridis (an excellent Jay Baruchel) - had the idea of a computer inside a phone using a free wireless signal but was in debt and out of its depth, with no prototype.Įnter Jim Balsillie (a superbly menacing Glenn Howerton) who snaps his Harvard-educated towel at the geeks, canceling movie nights and slamming their noses to the grindstones. Smart as the geeks were, they weren't modern businessmen. Johnson also stars as Doug Fregin, a headband-wearing, movie-quoting uber-geek, an amalgam of a few Research in Motion people.

“BlackBerry” tells the standard rise and fall of a tech startup that blows up, naturally leading to insider infighting - think “Silicon Valley” and “The Social Network” - but there's a twist here: The main money guy, while very shouty, is not the sleazy, bad guy you might expect.ĭirector and co-writer Matt Johnson recounts a breathless decade or so starting in 1996, when Research in Motion was just an office filled with tech geeks in Canada. The BlackBerry may seem quaint now in the days of sleek water resistant 5G phones with face ID, but it was the first mobile device with a pager, cellphone and email capability all in one thing.

People smart search