BlackBerry review – smartphone ‘buy-opic’ is a wild ride

Matt Johnson's boisterous drama about the rise and fall of the mobile - and the Canadian nerds who created it - diverges refreshingly from the usual arc of product success stories

Tech years are like dog years. Less than a decade and a half has passed since the early 2010 sheyday of the BlackBerry smartphone. But in the accelerated world of technology, the once coveted accessory of any self-respecting business bigshot or self-promoting celebrity (Paris Hilton used to carry five of them at a time) now might as well be an ancient relic.

By any standard, the BlackBerry story is a wild ride - going from a prototype cobbled together from bits of a pocket calculator to a product so addictive that it was nicknamed the CrackBerry; from a share of the US mobile phone market that was at one point estimated at about 40% to virtual oblivion in the space of just a few years. Based on the 2015 book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, the film, directed by Matt Johnson (The Dirties), is a boisterous account of the boom-and-bust, crash-and-burn trajectory of one of the world's first smartphones and the chaotic collection of Canadian nerds that created it.