This movie would have to be twice as good as it is just to suck. What it feels like is less a big-budget biopic and more like a third-rate ABC ‘Movie of the Week’.

I am aware that some readers might be too young to remember when the major networks did ‘Movies of the Week’. If that’s you, good for you being so young – here’s a quick primer.

In the long-ago 70s, three terrible networks ruled the land. They had no real competition except for cinema. To fight this lone enemy they created movies of their own, to run in the evening. The idea was to give you a mediocre but convenient option to keep you home. These films were uniformly cheap and indifferently constructed, and the reason you’ve never heard of them is because they were terrible, and people are ashamed. The only reason most of these films got watched is you had to work the TV box with your fingers, like actually stand up and touch it, and many of us could not be bothered to do so.

This is like those abominations, only somehow stupider. This is a film made by people who think if they get the clothing and facial hair configs right, the story will tell itself.

To their credit, they do work hard at making everyone look like they’re supposed to. They remind you of this with long shots of Ashton Kutcher in his Jobs drag, doing the stiff shamble of Jobs’ walk, making a thoughtful Jobsian grimace. They also throw up pictures of the real Apple team in the credits, next to the actors so you can see how good they were at making people look like other people.

The thing is, none of this crap really matters. All the makeup in the world can’t paper over the wooden script, the erratic tone and Jobs inexplicably crying all the time. This is essentially a PowerPoint presentation of the Jobs legend, flattened into bullet points with no discernible point of view. A lot of slides go by, but no real meaning or emotion is transferred.

There are a lot of truly cringe-inducing moments where some important plot point is shoehorned into some sloppy dialogue. My favorite is when the movie informs us that Jobs was given up for adoption by having him blurt it out during an acid trip. The acid trip scene itself is only there to remind us that Jobs is on record as pro-psychedelics. Once that scene is over, these factoids are never mentioned again.

It’s a missed opportunity, but one imagines that Jobs would probably prefer to be remembered for the near-perfect objects he left behind, rather than the messy, gritty life that led to them. Failing that, I imagine he’d like to have his movie made by someone with ideas.