Friday marked the release of the newest Fast and Furious movie, but largely, I am not here to talk about that, because that movie was terrible. It was two hours and twenty minutes of a convoluted plot with a mediocre, at best, story, that sometimes had good action, and if I am being honest in one of the biggest action set pieces I fell asleep, and if I can fall asleep in one of the big action set pieces, then how good could it of been? So instead I would like to talk about the much smaller film that deserves much more love, and that I currently have in the top three films of the year, and that is BlackBerry.
BlackBerry is the story of the creation that eventually turned into the well-beloved cellphone, the BlackBerry. Initially Mike Lazaridis and his friend Doug were running a small business trying to create innovative technology, and they felt like their best chance was to create a cellphone, that can take advantage of all the free internet that was being emitted out into the world, and then they could capitalize on that by allowing cellphones to have email on them. I know, groundbreaking stuff! They brought their idea to a bigger tech company, but they were blown off by the executive, but a day later, Jim Balsillie, the executive who had blown them off, charges into the office, after being freshly fired, and he bets on the small rag tag group of programmers. Balsillie lights a fire under them, that Lazaridis was unable to do, and this helped propel the company to success. They were able to sell their design and idea to a phone company, and they started to rake in cash.
This is not where the story ends however. They become so much of a success, that the networks cannot handle having any more BlackBerries on them, or the network will crash. So Balsillie tells his salesmen team to keep selling the phones, and then he goes around to the best tech companies in the world like Google and Nintendo, and he brings their lead workers back to BlackBerry, and he has them help to solve this problem, and they do, but this ends up creating a bigger problem, because to get these tech geniuses, Balsillie gave them some illegal stock options, and eventually the SEC finds out about it, and they go on offense attacking the company.
To be honest, when I first heard that there was a movie coming out about the creation of the BlackBerry, I did not care at all. Then it came out, and I heard some decent reviews, but I still was not that interested in going to see it. I mean it is a 2-hour movie about BlackBerry, come on. Then I heard an interview with the director of the movie, Matt Johnson, who also played an integral role in this film, and I was hooked. I had to go see the movie, so the next day, I bought a ticket.
In the interview with Matt Johnson, I found out that he was the director of Operation Avalanche. To get my Operation Avalanche story, we have to go back to when I was a sophomore or junior in college. One weekend, my friends and I went on a camping trip to Cherokee Rock Village, a park in Alabama that has a lot of large rocks to climb. While there, we went for a drive around the area, and in this small Alabama town, they had a Block Buster type video store called Video Hut, and it was right next to a Little Caesars pizza place, so while we were waiting for our dinner to be ready, we went into the video store and perused around.
This is where I saw the case for Operation Avalanche, and I flipped the case over and read about the movie on the back. Sometimes I forget that DVDs existed like this, it was an amazing time. The movie is about a film making crew hired to fake the first moon landing. It is a found footage style film that is like a fake documentary about how they did it, and the people that start to come after them for doing it. This sounded amazing to me, but sadly we were camping, so it is not like I could rent this movie and go watch it. So when I got back to campus later in the weekend, I found it somewhere online and watched it, and I loved it.
So that was all that needed to be said in the interview to get me all in on this movie, but there was more that got me interested. Just like Operation Avalanche, the filming style of this movie was like a documentary. They used the same cameras that National Geographic uses when making documentaries, so they would set up the cameras from far away to get the shots, and it looked great, and the cinematography was really well done. Johnson also said that he had to remove minutes of the movie, because audiences were laughing too much. I had no idea that the movie was going to be funny, but let me tell you, everyone in my theater was laughing out loud, but to be fair, I was the only person in the theater, so take that as you will. It was funnier than most recent comedies, that is for sure.
The movie also finished tragically, because as you know, no one has a BlackBerry phone anymore. Part of this came due to the SEC investigation, but the investigation let Lazaridis go free, so the brains of the operation was still around, but he sold out to China, and his previous mindset of it has to be perfect shifted to the corporate idea of good enough, and it cost him. The new phone was a total flop, and this was right at the time of the first iPhone drop, so the mistake was unrecoverable from. So sadly, the beautiful invention known as the BlackBerry disappeared.
It kind of reminds me of the Fast and Furious franchise. It started out as something small that gained popularity, and now that they have hit it big, they have settled for good enough, which is never good enough, and it has led to some seriously terrible movies, that only have some level of redemption, because the cars still look awesome. The best part of this movie was the flashback to Fast 5. The movie opens with a look back on this film, because it sets up the villain for Fast X, who was played by Jason Momoa, and Momoa gives an incredibly weird performance as an unhinged villain, that I still do not know how to feel.
They tried to make this movie funny, but it failed. There were times when they would set up a joke, and there was just nothing there. Also there were only three other people in the massive theater with me, which even for a two o’clock showing on a Friday is super light for a franchise film such as this. So this $300 million dollar film might not even have the power to make money, and it does not deserve to do so. One of the oddest choices this film makes is with Dom’s kid. John Cena’s car has a rocket launcher attached to it, and Dom’s son literally fires the rockets, and thus he is killing people, and he is having a good time doing it. So basically, they turn this kid into a killer, and he has no consciousness about this. I know this is a dumb nit to pick in a ridiculous franchise, but it still just does not sit well with me. So if you can, I suggest going to see BlackBerry in theaters, not Fast X, never watch Fast X, and if you do not have a chance to see BlackBerry in theaters, wait for it stream somewhere and watch it! I highly recommend it, and I give it 4 stars, and Fast X gets 2 stars.
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