Pinocchio (2022): A Review
/****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!!! BUT THE MOVIE IS SO BAD IT DOESN’T MATTER!!!****
My Rating: .25 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Truly horrendous film. Go watch the original 1940 animated version instead.
I’m old enough to remember when Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis were considered among the most talented in their respective crafts in Hollywood.
Hanks won back-to-back Best Actor Oscars in the mid-90’s, the second of which came for his work in Forest Gump, which was directed by none other than Robert Zemeckis, a feat which earned him both a Best Director and Best Picture statuette at the Academy Awards.
Forest Gump was a coronation for both Zemeckis and Hanks. Zemeckis had been a “Spielberg-in waiting” ever since he hit the jackpot with the Back to the Future franchise and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and the Forest Gump Oscar triumph solidified his standing as the pop cinema auteur of his time. Hanks’s win for Forest Gump crowned him as the new Jimmy Stewart and nice guy King of Hollywood.
Well, a lot can change in 28 years.
Proof of that is the new live-action Pinocchio currently streaming on Disney +. The film is directed by Zemeckis and stars Hanks and it stands as a monument to how far their once glorious careers have fallen.
In the early 2000’s Zemeckis fell in love with motion capture CGI technology and churned out a plethora of idiotic, ugly garbage like The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol. As a result of his CGI infatuation, Zemeckis’ career has gone deep down the toilet and landed in the septic tank that is Pinocchio.
Since the start of the 21st Century, intelligence agency asset/lapdog/mascot Tom Hanks has not fared much better as his choice in films and his performances in those films, has exposed him to be a rather shallow, vacuous, vapid and remarkably unskilled actor.
For example, even in good films, like say, Catch Me If You Can or Captain Phillips, Hanks manages to be the worst thing in them as he mucks things up with egregiously awful accents of which he has absolutely no clue, never mind mastery. In recent years he has been reduced to slumming it in second and third-rate direct to streaming projects like Pinocchio.
Which brings us to Pinocchio. It is sort of remarkable how appalling this movie is. The script is abysmally bad, the acting atrocious and the direction simply dreadful.
The story of Pinocchio is well-known, and I assume everyone’s seen the original Disney animated film from 1940 which Disney it’s theme song of “When You Wish Upon A Star”. That film is terrific, but Disney apparently needs to remake everything now in order to keep up with ever-changing cultural mores and assuage the PC police, and so we get the NEW Pinocchio.
This new Pinocchio features Tom Hanks as Geppetto, who once again rolls out once of the worst accents in film history. It is difficult to overstate the awfulness of Hanks’s acting in this movie. His shtick is so tired and amateurish it would be laughed off the stage at a Children’s Theater in a small Midwestern suburb.
Hanks, and the rest of the cast, do something that is a surefire sign that they are mailing it in and are being under-directed, which is they incessantly either laugh or smile to fill the empty space in scenes. Hanks spontaneously and inappropriately laughs so much in Pinocchio he appears to be having either a nervous breakdown or a stroke.
Luke Evans as the Coachman and Guiseppe Battistone as Stromboli do the same laughing thing over and over. And poor Cynthia Erevo, who is brutally miscast as the Blue Fairy, paints the most uncomfortable smile on her face for the duration of her dismal scene.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the voice actor for Jiminy Cricket who, for some reason, has an accent from the American South despite the story taking place in rural Italy, and he sounds like John Waters reading the minutes from a NAMBLA meeting.
Changes were made to the Pinocchio cast and story in order to accommodate the current cultural climate, so we get a rather sever looking Erivo as the Blue Fairy and Kyanne Lamaya as Fabiana, the puppeteer of Sabina the ballerina. Poor Lamaya is forced to pretend to be a ventriloquist for no apparent reason, and then at one point in the film that charade is discarded, again, for no apparent reason.
Other changes are that the whale who swallows Geppetto and Pinocchio (in this version they are eaten together at the same time) has been morphed into a giant whale/squid/Kraken monster for some unexplained reason. And the ending of the movie is different too…again…for no apparent reason.
The film is riddled with inanities and idiocies that boggle the mind. For example, at one point Pinocchio and Jiminy want to go to sea to find Geppetto but can’t figure out how…but then they jerry-rig a seagull and para-surf out to sea. But then when they are escaping the sea monster, Pinoccio shows he can swim faster than any human because of his wooden legs and carries Geppetto to safety. I’d highlight more of this nonsense but let’s be honest…nobody gives a fuck.
On top of all this, the CGI in the film is so second rate as to be embarrassing. Zemeckis does all he can to accentuate how awful the CGI is by having real life actors hold and caress CGI animals, which only highlights how fake everything looks.
And of course, the movie ends with Pinocchio still a wooden toy but because in his heart he thinks he’s a real boy, then he is a real boy. I suppose this is Disney’s way of signaling their virtue regarding the trans movement. How brave.
The bottom line regarding this version of Pinocchio is that there is no reason to make this movie and certainly no reason to make it so poorly.
I’m sure Hanks and Zemeckis will make more movies going forward and I’m sure they’ll be as shitty as Pinocchio, but when I wish upon a star, I wish that this horrendously heinous movie is the final nail in the coffin of their insipidly saccharine careers. A man can dream.
©2022