Reviewing "Jobs": One-of-a-kind innovator gets by-the-numbers biopic
Because you are reading this movie review on a tech site and not, say, in the pages of Cat Fancy, I assume that you have a passing familiarity with Steve Jobs. Even if you can’t quote chapter and verse from Jobs’s biography, you likely know the highlights—that Jobs and Steve Wozniak built a computer in a garage, that they parlayed that computer into a company, and that the company they formed later produced the Macintosh and other gadgets of renown. And if that is the case—if you are perfectly well aware of these things—very little about Jobs, the newly released biopic of Apple’s late cofounder and long-time CEO, will surprise or shock you.
Starring Ashton Kutcher in the title role, Jobs ticks off all the boxes you’d expect in a movie that tracks Jobs from his college drop-out days all the way up to his late ’90s return to Apple after years in exile, including a prologue about the 2001 introduction of the iPod thrown in to hint at the greater glories to come. To the masses who recognize Steve Jobs only as that guy in the black turtleneck who quite literally pulled new gadgets out of his pocket, the movie may be a revelation. To anyone steeped in the history and mythology of Apple, however, it will be a recitation of facts already entered into the record.
Glen Wilson/Open Road FilmsIn 'Jobs,' Ashton Kutcher has the unenviable task of bringing Steve Jobs to life on the big screen.
But will Apple fans at least find Jobs entertaining? Even at a run time that’s just a few ticks over 2 hours, the movie zips along, though things do begin to lag when the action shifts to the board room machinations that led to Jobs’s ouster from Apple in 1985. For a scripted drama, it includes few head-slapping errors likely to dampen your enjoyment of the picture (though admirers of Jef Raskin may do a double-take to see his role in the creation of the Macintosh reduced to that of “officious functionary”). Remove the baggage that comes with documenting Steve Jobs’s life from the equation, and this is a pleasant though not particularly moving biopic about a visionary’s attempt to show the rest of the world what personal computing could make possible.
If that sounds like a tepid endorsement, it’s only because Jobs never breaks free from the “And then this happened” style of narrative that handcuffs conventional biopics. Nor does Jobs seem to want to turn convention on its ear—an odd choice for a movie about a man who made his mark by refusing to put square pegs in the corresponding holes.
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