If you already know the story of Steve Jobs, this movie probably won’t provide you with much fresh insight, but it’s still worth a watch. Although it must be said that it never even comes close to the heights of the other film about a prickly tech titan: The Social Network.
What Works: Steve Jobs was a great man and an innovator. And like all great men and innovators, he could be a real a-hole. His drive, his vision, and his artistry basically gave birth to personal computing but it didn’t make him a very good father (he wouldn’t claim his daughter for much of his life), a very good friend (he screws over one of his best friends by denying them founder’s stock in Apple), or a very nice boss. What it did do was allow him to see the world in a way that the utterly mediocre former Pepsi CEO John Scully (Apple’s one-time CEO that pushed Jobs out and nearly destroyed Apple) or the Wall Street money pushers never could. Jobs battles with the money people who will never understand his own company feel like a fight for the very soul of American innovation. And we can only imagine the heartbreak of getting pushed out of something that you created, built, and breathed life into. The most successful parts of Jobs are the company duels that drive the last half of the movie, and also the revelation that Bill Gates (the on-again, off-again richest man in the world) actually ripped Steve Jobs off wholesale.
What Doesn’t Work: It’s hard to know if Ashton Kutcher’s portrayal of Jobs is really good or really bad. He delivers his lines in a very controlled, deliberate way and you can’t tell if that’s an honest portrayal of Steve’s intensity or because Kutcher is struggling in his first real dramatic role and doesn’t want to botch it. That’s a problem in a movie where none of the supporting cast really pops, and we’re following either bland tech geniuses or blander money pushers.
What I Would Have Done Differently: The movie covers all the bases and plays all the right cords, but there’s just something missing in the center. For a movie about a visionary, there’s an odd lack of magic at the core. If we could have seen just one scene of how Steve’s mind actually works (he’s seen managing people more than thinking up big ideas himself) it might have really pulled the film together.