It's a movie about the quick rise and sudden fall of Research in Motion, the Canadian company which invented the Smart Phone, Told as a sequences of crises, its two main players are Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis, an obsessive-compulsive wimp who actually knows what he is talking about when it comes to building computers, and Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie, a loud-mouthed businessman with a degree from Harvard, who recognizes that, and is happy to bs his way through everything. At its peak, the company had a market capitalization of almost $70 billion dollars. Then Steve Job came in and did the same thing in a package that was better designed and offered telephone companies not just user minutes, but data transfer, and it all went away overnight -- according to this movie, anyway.
There's no one to root for here, with the engineers, as Michael Ironside, the shouty man brought in to bring some discipline to the company notes, a bunch of children, Howerton thoroughly unlikable, and so forth. Cary Elwes has a sizable role as a smarmy competitor.
Like many movies about business, this one is pretty shaky with the facts. Likewise, other than "don't think you're irreplaceable" there doesn't seem to be much of a point to this movie. It's largely carried on the noisy performances, with Howerton's increasingly out-of-control Balsillie pretty interesting, if annoying.
There's no one to root for here, with the engineers, as Michael Ironside, the shouty man brought in to bring some discipline to the company notes, a bunch of children, Howerton thoroughly unlikable, and so forth. Cary Elwes has a sizable role as a smarmy competitor.
Like many movies about business, this one is pretty shaky with the facts. Likewise, other than "don't think you're irreplaceable" there doesn't seem to be much of a point to this movie. It's largely carried on the noisy performances, with Howerton's increasingly out-of-control Balsillie pretty interesting, if annoying.
