Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs in the new movie about the Apple co-founder's life.
While Ashton Kutcher is getting approving nods for his portrayal of Steve Jobs' in the new biopic Jobs (former called jOBS), reviewers are mixed but mostly unimpressed with the film's take on the Apple's co-founder early life.
"Kutcher speaks fully 40 percent of the lines in Jobs. Unfortunately, he has almost no one to play off of," Cnet's Casey Newton writes in his review from Park City, Utah, after the movie's debut at the Sundance Film Festival last night. "All Apple failures in Jobs are portrayed as the result of conservative, backward-thinking executives beholden only to their shareholders. The result is that the viewer spends two hours watching cardboard cutouts lose arguments to Ashton Kutcher."
Kutcher, in interviews at Sundance, says that playing the mercurial Jobs was "honestly one of the most terrifying things I've ever tried to do in my life…It was kind of like throwing myself into this gauntlet of, I know, massive amounts of criticism because somebody's going to go 'well, it wasn't exactly…"
Kutcher says he even tried Jobs' fruitarian diet, only to end up sick. "I ended up in the hospital two days before we started shooting the movie," he said. "I was like doubled over in pain, and my pancreas levels were completely out of whack, which was completely terrifying, considering everything."
Jobs died of complications from pancreatic cancer in October 2011 at the age of 56.
Even so, Kutcher said he found Job's life inspiring. "I don't know if there's ever been an entrepreneur who's had more compassion and care for his consumer than Steve Jobs," Kutcher said. "He wanted to put something in your hand that you could use and you could use it easily… and he really cared about that."
Apple's other co-founder, Steve Wozniak, has said the short clips released before the movie's debut seem to get the relationship between the two "totally wrong." He took exception to a scene that suggests Jobs' was the one who saw the potential of the personal computer. "Personalities and where the ideas of computers affecting society did not come from Jobs," Wozniak told Gizmodo earlier this week. "They inspired me and were widely spoken at the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve came back from Oregon and came to a club meeting and didn't start talking about this great social impact. His idea was to make a $20 PC board and sell it for $40 to help people at the club build the computer I'd given away."
The filmmakers responded to the Woz's criticism. "The film is not a documentary, nor is it meant to be a blow by blow, word for word account of all conversations and events," Jobs publicist Amanda Lundberg said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly, which posted the first clip from the movie earlier this week. "The filmmakers have tremendous admiration and respect for Wozniak and all those that are portrayed in the film, and did extensive research in an effort to make an entertaining accurate film that captures the essence and story of Steve Jobs and those that built Apple with him. The filmmakers acknowledge that not every single thing in the film is a precise representation of what took place, but is feature film entertainment about one of the most important, creative and impactful people [in] our culture's history taking place over three decades [that are] compressed into a two hour film."
Here are some excerpts from the reviews of Jobs, which also stars Josh Gad as Wozniak and was directed by Joshua Michael Stern. The film will be released in theaters April 19. No word yet on when the other Jobs' film, being written by Aaron Sorkin, will be released or who will play Jobs.
The PC version. "Ashton Kutcher plays the title role and does a good job at making you forget there's a big star under the beard and glasses," writes Germain Lussier of SlashFilm.com. "It's the script by Matt Whiteley, however, where the cracks begin to show. Jobs [the new official spelling of the title] is so hell-bent on cramming all these seminal moments into one film, it never builds much context around them. We never feel like they mean anything or understand the "why" about the big moments. The film loves to tell us things, but never quite explains any in a satisfactory way. The resulting product is an entertaining but flawed take on the man who co-created Apple….Apple fans are going to be very mixed on Jobs. On one hand here's the story they've been dying to see, on screen, and it looks great. But the film feels slight because it tries to do too much. The effort is there and the film is entertaining, but it's feels like the PC version of the story instead of the Apple."
Saccharine. "Others will write of the things Jobs omits, gets wrong, or simply avoids," Newton writes in his review for Cnet. "My primary disappointment was in how shallow the film felt, given the extensive historical record. In the early days Jobs' co-workers had to wrestle with a man who smelled bad, who cried often, who yelled constantly, who missed deadlines, who overspent his budget by millions. He did it in service of products we love and use daily, and yet his obsessions took a toll on those around him. It also inspired others to do the best work of their lives, pushing themselves further than they ever imagined they can go. There is great drama to be found in all that, but it is not to be found in the saccharine Jobs."
Josh Gad plays Apple-co founder Steve "Woz" Wozniak in the new biopic "Jobs."
Made-for-TV. "Stylishly realized despite its unsophisticated storyline, Jobs has been shot by Russell Carpenter with brightly lit images that accentuate the eponymous innovator's constant motivation. That achievement is complemented by Kutcher's committed performance, certainly his most impressive turn in years, which conveys the character's focused, manipulative intentions in each calculated look," writes Eric Kohn in IndieWire, describing the movie as a "tame" biopic. "But Matt Whiteley's by-the-numbers screenplay, which tracks Jobs from his slacker days as a college dropout to the launching of Apple computers in his parents garage and eventual transformation into billionaire CEO, can't keep pace. Shifting through bullet points of moments from Jobs' life, the story maintains the subtleties of a made-for-TV movie and relates an origin tale with a superficiality one could obtain through a cursory browsing of Jobs' Wikipedia page."
Not ground breaking. "Paying somewhat like a two-hour commercial covering the first 20 tumultuous years of Apple's development, Joshua Michael Stern's biopic of Steve Jobs is a passably entertaining account of the career of one of the 20th century's great innovators that doesn't break any stylistic ground, hewing closely to public perception of the tech giant," says Justin Lowe in The Hollywood Reporter. "Kutcher has an advantage in the role with his passing resemblance to Jobs, but he also faithfully re-creates some of his character's physical mannerisms for additional dimensionality. He manages a fair imitation of Jobs' speaking style as well, particularly when delivering a number of monologues, usually while haranguing his employees or board of directors. [Josh] Gad could have profitably been given more to do in the Wozniak role, particularly since the many boardroom scenes might seem repetitive."
Workmanlike and entertaining. "Jobs opens with the introduction of the iPod on October 23, 2001 at an Apple Town Hall meeting," writes Matthew Panzarino in The Next Web. "In the audience are a somewhat slimmer Jony Ive and other Apple employees. In the scene, Ashton Kutcher, as an aged and bearded Jobs, delivers the product and a company stump speech over a rolling crescendo of a score that wouldn't feel out of place at the climax of a sword and sandals epic. It's one of a couple of cringe-worthy moments that places events from Jobs' life on a pedestal, hammering the audience over the head with their significance. Thankfully, there are only a couple of these moments in what is otherwise a workmanlike and entertaining movie about the 'first era' of Steve Jobs."
Pat sentiments. "For the last decade of his life the public image of Steve Jobs was the same every year: a man standing in front of a large crowd, showing them some incredible piece of technology, and reveling in the massive applause. Ideally in a biopic you're going to see something more, but Jobs starts off with that scene exactly– Jobs showing the Apple team the iPod for the first time in 2001– and repeats it a half dozen times. A biopic about a great man that's way too aware of his greatness, jOBS tells us a lot about the genius of Steve Jobs, but doesn't show us much of anything that actually reveals it," says Katey Rich of CinemaBlend.com. " The Steve Jobs of this movie, who's constantly berating his employees to come up with something better than the status quo, would have hated the pat sentiments and dull direction of jOBS. Apple urged people to think different. jOBS does anything but.
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