Recently, the world has been pretty high on Ashton Kutcher thanks to his extremely inspirational speech at this year’s Teen Choice Awards. Many even said that he was channeling the late, great Steve Jobs, who the actor would be portraying in the biopic ‘Jobs’, which was released this weekend. However, his performance as the co-founder of Apple didn’t quite measure up to that speech in the eyes of the critics. Not only that, but some of the people who lived the events of the movie didn’t exactly go for Kutcher’s performance either.
Steve Wozniack, who is portrayed in Joshua Michael Stern’s film by the wonderful Josh Gad, weighed in with his review of ‘Jobs’ over on Gizmodo. Previously, he had called a clip from the movie “totally wrong”, but understood that filmmakers will take dramatic license with actual events to make them more interesting. Those remarks sparked Kutcher to claim in a Washington Post interview that the icon in the technological world was coming down on the clip because he was “being paid by another company to support their Steve Jobs film”, so Woz also addressed the actor’s comments as well by eloquently calling Ashton Kutcher a douche essentially:
“I saw ‘Jobs’ tonight. I thought the acting throughout was good. I was attentive and entertained but not greatly enough to recommend the movie. One friend who is in the movie said he didn’t want to watch fiction so he wasn’t interested in seeing it.
I suspect a lot of what was wrong with the film came from Ashton’s own image of Jobs. Ashton made some disingenuous and wrong statements about me recently (including my supposedly having said that the ‘movie’ was bad, which was probably Ashton believing pop press headlines) and that I didn’t like the movie because I’m paid to consult on another one. These are examples of Ashton still being in character. Either film would have paid me to consult, but the Jobs one already had a script written. I can’t take that creative leadership from someone else. And I was turned off by the ‘Jobs’ script. But I still hoped for a great movie.”
After seeing the film myself, I completely agree with Woz in that I wouldn’t really recommend ‘Jobs’ either. While Apple fanboys may enjoy it, the film just didn’t go into enough information and interesting events from Jobs’ life to warrant high praise. Basically, it only chronicled the man’s interactions at Apple and it didn’t even do that all that well. Hopefully Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs biopic will learn from the mistakes of ‘Jobs’ and succeeds where it’s successor failed.
‘Jobs’ starring Ashton Kutcher, Josh Gad, Dermot Mulroney, J.K. Simmons, Lukas Haas, Matthew Modine, and Ahna O’Reilly is in theaters now.
