Review of “Pinocchio”: Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis’ Failed Disney Remake

This adaptation of the well-known children’s story, which debuted before Guillermo del Toro’s, also stars Cynthia Erivo and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

 

When faced with the perennial challenge of competing against a film that sounds exactly like yours (e.g., a meteor threatens the planet, a volcano threatens a city, or Truman Capote makes friends), it may be consoling for the director to tell himself that his rival is an unknown whose movie won’t cause any real problems. You don’t want Guillermo del Toro to direct the other film, particularly if it deals with a subject he was almost born to tackle.

 

Even without a second ambitious remake in the works, Robert Zemeckis’ live action/CG hybrid Pinocchio movie wouldn’t be in a great position. It arrives today as merely another widget in Disney’s “remake ’em all!” programme, a well-intentioned endeavour whose pedigree promised the prospect of something better. (At least Disney’s profit strategy doesn’t involve deleting films they recently produced from existence, unlike Warners’.)

 

The greatest news first: Zemeckis has thankfully refrained from sending actor Tom Hanks back into The Polar Express’s CG uncanny valley. As Geppetto, the actor dons his own skin, a curly wig, and a bland Italian accent. He is sitting there, carving a small toy while whispering rhymes to himself and longing for his deceased son. An odd-looking cricket in a tramp costume standing outside the elderly man’s business is chatting in a folksy language that is obviously not Italian. Joseph Gordon-Levitt isn’t immediately recognisable as the voice, but that’s not a big deal because Jiminy Cricket’s worth in this film is primarily physical — he’s blown around, rides on pyrotechnics, and avoids monsters as he attempts to keep up with Pinocchio.

 

The cricket must also avoid moral pitfalls. The Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo) tells Jiminy he will have to act as Pinocchio’s conscience, helping him become deserving of the shift from sorta-real to an actual flesh and blood boy, after a wishful Geppetto unintentionally summons her and she animates the puppet while he is asleep.

 

More good news: The child moves and sounds virtually exactly how one would imagine after being released from his restraints. The voice acting of Benjamin Evan Ainsworth flirts with being both sweet and overly cute, but stays on the right side; animators move his limbs with a joyous sense of discovery. Unfortunately, the pine-skulled child is too gleefully credulous to make the proper deductions.

 

As Pinocchio leaves for school for the first time, Honest John (Keegan-Michael Key), a cunning fox who promises him fame rather than education, stops him. Although John, Pine-boy, and the other humans don’t precisely appear to be from the same dimension, Key’s delivery makes the point. If only screenwriters Chris Weitz and Zemeckis could have resisted the urge to embellish his speech with the feared word “influencer” and to emphasise it with a “did you catch that?” visual flourish.

 

(At a few other times, the writing does better with inane jokes aimed at amusing adults. But they are much too few to make a difference.)

 

Viewers will remember Pinoke getting into risky situations after dangerous situations, being taken farther and farther from home while having no desire to leave his maker/papa, vaguely or precisely. However, one puppeteer, Fabiana (Kyanne Lamaya), a virtual prisoner of the hideous impresario Stromboli (Giuseppe Battiston), genuinely wants to help him. The most of the new pals he makes are unreliable. Fortunately, Zemeckis isn’t really dedicated to making this a musical, and songs (even well-known ones) tend to trickle off to silence before wearing out their welcome. Lamaya gives Fabiana a warm heart, but the new song Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard wrote for her sounds out of place here.

 

The most notable of Pinocchio’s dangers is his visit to Pleasure Island, a place of extremely poor behaviour where children unintentionally transform into jerks. They overindulge in a theme park that is brilliantly imagined but carelessly executed: Perhaps it was an artistic choice to make downing that enormous mug of root beer look completely unrealistic, but the flimsiness of those boats coursing through seas of candy is too much to forgive and most definitely not on purpose. Later, with boats and water splashing around inside a sea monster’s interior, the same FX issues recur. With these resources, terrible CG in a production shouldn’t be an issue in 2022.