Pinocchio (2022)

Pinocchio (2022)

 

3/10

Starring

Tom Hanks

Benjamin Evan Ainsworth

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

 

Directed by Robert Zemeckis

 

This Disney Live Action remake is all skeleton and no flesh.

If I was anywhere near the board of people who decide what movies to be made, I will not have advised about this one. It looked like a mountain to succumb with the idea of making a movie about a puppet who wants to be a real boy and must overcome many things to do it. When you see 1940 Pinocchio the fun was in the comedy which followed Pinocchio’s journey and Pinocchio’s string of bad decisions. I saw the movie in the early 90s and then was no problem seeing a child smoke on screen, drinking beer (not root beer as in this movie). The cruelty of Pinocchio’s experience and the almost impossible things he had to get out off to save himself and his father.

This movie made one big mistake; it did not go all the way. Why not? Why stop where they were saved from Monstro? Why not give us the whole ordeal of Pinocchio lying because he was a bad boy? Why not show us Pinocchio being sold for money? What about the end and the donkey incident, why not just show us Pinocchio being bad and just running off again?

The story of Pinocchio being swept by the moment was just annoying and did not make the movie any better, but boring and made it look like a washed-up job that could only survive on TV slots when everyone will be sleeping.

The wonderful CGI in this movie is the only thing that is good in a story of a man who made a little wooden boy to serve as a cork to seal his bleeding heart for the loss of his own son. Before going to bed he wished that the puppet be real, and he was awoken to a puppet moving about his home with no strings.

Pinocchio had to show himself true, brave, and wise to finally complete the transformation from a wooden boy to a real one. A task he can only accomplish with his guide Jimmy the Cricket as his conscience.

The journey to being a real boy starts the next day with a kick in the butt on reality that children are expected in schools and puppets are meant to be in puppet shows. This one incident led our wanting to be a real boy down a path of sad things where he almost lost his life and that of his father on his misguided journey through life on his first day.

I never saw enough marketing on this movie, so I guess Disney also knew it was a dud.