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Film Reviews

JOBS

By • Sep 5th, 2013 •

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I’m not alone. Like zillions of others, I’ve spent eons of hours practically glued to my Mac, so you can well imagine how anxious I was to see JOBS, the biopic of Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs, starring look-alike Ashton Kutcher.

But like so many other major summer releases, it crashed on arrival, barely making a b/o impact—and deservedly so.

You can’t blame its failings on the subject matter. Almost anyone with a desk-or-laptop, iPod, iPhone and iPad —meaning most of us— is familiar with both Steves: Jobs and his brilliant high tech buddy Wozniak (played by Josh Gad), who, working out of a garage near Silicon Valley, revolutionized the industry by creating the world’s most successful computer, worth a fortune.

Unfortunately, the film spends almost no time exploring Jobs’ background and attitudes (i.e. he was adopted, was a college drop-out, fathered a child whom he ignored) as he went through his short life in a miserable, angry funk.

What the film does show is Kutcher’s to-a-tee mimicking Jobs’ ape-like struts, his uber-controlling treatment of high tech execs and underlings, and doesn’t even touch upon his impending illness and death in 2011 at age 56. Too bad. It would have mattered, and made this film memorable. Instead, almost all 2+ hours of JOBS is forgettable.

Bottom Line:

Here, the fault, dear Brutus, lies not with the stars (they’re all quite adequate – including Dermot Mulroney, Lukas Haas, Matthew Modine and James Woods), but with Joshua Michael Stern ‘s direction and Matt Whiteley’s start-up script — both banal.

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