Ashton Kutcher gets Jobs, but the movie misses attitude

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      Starring Ashton Kutcher, Dermot Mulroney, and Josh Gad. Rated PG.

      There’s nothing wrong with casting Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs, the now-dead capitalist visionary behind Apple’s many electromagnetic successes. He’s got the introverted, gangly shuffle just right, as well as the guy’s inclination to pitch ideas to one or two people as if addressing a crowd. No, it’s the movie Jobs that seems to get off on the wrong foot and never quite find its way.

      Kutcher plays Jobs from his shoeless college days to the dawn of the iPod era, with plenty of rough patches in between. It eschews the tech magnate’s later terminal illness but assumes that viewers know something of the Silicon Valley environment that gave rise to Jobs and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad), as well as the parallel rise of Microsoft honcho Bill Gates—who is only mentioned in angry passing, after Jobs manages to wrest back control of the company he temporarily lost.

      Written by newcomer Matt Whiteley and directed by Joshua Michael Stern, this reasonably engaging tale isn’t pure hagiography: it shows Jobs’s cavalier attitude toward women and humans in general. (Dermot Mulroney stands out as a corporate financier who attempts to befriend him.) However, it is confused about its subject. When tackling someone who captured the public’s imagination, attitude is critical; they certainly need to have one.

      Here, someone calls this famously abusive boss “kind of an asshole” just before John Debney’s faux-Americana music follows him down a hall, as if a young Thomas Jefferson was pondering the fate of a nation. Worse, the movie presents Jobs as an inventor when he was really more of an editor whose genius involved making the best possible decisions among choices presented by others.

      Too bad Stern and Whiteley didn’t learn from, or even notice, that process.

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