Jobs movie review & film summary (2013)
That judgment might be a tad harsh, especially since that dear boy Ashton Kutcher—considered a media savant of sorts himself for having hatched TV’s "Punk'd" and apparently beating CNN in a Twitter-follower race—really, really, REALLY tries to make us believe he is the Machiavelli of the Mac, the man who put the personal into computing. It isn't an easy job to be Jobs, after all. He might have died in 2011 at age 56 but his presence will continue to loom large as long as there are Apple stores in malls. But Kutcher never totally recovers from an introductory scene set in 2001 when, in full Zen master mode, he introduces the iPod as "a music player…1,000 tunes in your pocket" to an auditorium filled with rapt acolytes.
You only get a teasing glimpse of Kutcher in puffy middle-age makeup, most likely because he looks a little ridiculous decked out in Jobs's signature uniform: round wire-rimmed specs, gray beard and short-cropped hair, black mock turtleneck and Levis. And that is probably also a reason that the story then rewinds and instead focuses on Jobs from his college years to his early 40s. That way, the 35-year-old Kutcher can get away with his impersonation by simply varying his hair and beard length while regularly glaring with opportunistic intent.
In other scenes, the actor affectedly walks with a deliberate stooped gait, presumably emulating the real Jobs. Or maybe it's just that the responsibility of bringing such a larger-than-life icon to life is weighing down the star of "Dude, Where's My Car?"
But it isn't really fair to lay the primary fault for this geek tragedy's rather rote approach at the feet of its leading man. Feet, by the way, that are often unshod since, as we are shown numerous times, Jobs made a habit out of eschewing shoes—all the better to make a half-hearted Christ-figure analogy. The trouble is, we don't find out much else about the guy's motivations save for this take-no-prisoners drive to be the best in the biz. All the historic moments are duly ticked off, from Jobs freeing his mind with LSD and going to India in his college-dropout years to the supposed instant he came up with the corporate name of Apple. But while Jobs might have touted the iPod as a tool with a heart, this portrait of him is too often without a pulse.
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