The Critics Have Spoken: "Jobs" Is Far Less Revolutionary Than Its Title Character

Jobs – the biopic, tracking Steve Jobs’s rise from a free-spirited college dropout, to an undisputed giant of the tech industry, has come out to surprisingly good reviews. While most critics are hesitant to heap glowing praise onto the film, it isn’t the vapid, melodramatic disaster of a biopic that some were predicting from the onset.

">Watch the trailer for Jobs below.

Quite the opposite actually. The biggest fault The Washington Post’s Michael O’Sullivan finds with the picture is that it focuses too much on Jobs’ corporate prowess, leaving little time for personal revelations that would have enticed the audience. That said, however, O’Sullivan doesn’t fail to mention that Ashton Kutcher has done a good job with what he had to work on. Perhaps more at home as a young and rebellious Jobs, than as the established CEO of a thriving company, Kutcher still manages to capture Jobs’ characteristic speech and mannerisms and, at times, even his essence.

Ashton Kutcher at a screening of Jobs.

Catch more pictures from the screening in our gallery.

The LA Times’ Mark Olsen, however, fails to find the charm in Kutcher’s performance, dubbing it “an assemblage of mannerisms with no deeper feeling or understanding.” This, for Olsen, is an overarching theme in the film – “a life told in product launches,” as the review describes Jobs, the movie. The film, as well as the actor, never dive any deeper than the visionary’s public persona. This makes the whole affair entertaining, but unlike Steve Jobs himself, never quite revolutionary.

Even his not-that-bad performance isn't enough to save the film.

Then there’s The Guardian review, which makes no pretense of praising the film at all. Brian Moylan sees Jobs as shallow and superficial, but most of all unrealistic. He pegs Jobs’ problem as “that it doesn't necessarily present anything real or true, but it presents the sort of Steve Jobs that people want to see.” Unfortunately, after such limited praise, it is unlikely that even the biggest Steve Jobs fanboys and girls would shell out for a ticket to see this.

The reviews haven't been kind to Kutcher, or the movie.