Why?
That’s the one and only question that goes through my head whenever I sit down
to watch the latest live-action Disney remake. Is it yet another cynical and
calculated attempt to turn nostalgia into cold hard cash? Is it merely an
expensive ploy to renew the copyright for the original animated film somehow?
Or is it a genuine reimagining that actually has some artistic merit and
something meaningful to say? Well, I don’t know what Pinocchio (2022)
was, but it certainly wasn’t this last one.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis and
starring Tom Hanks as Geppetto, there’s really no reason for Pinocchio to
be as bland as it is. I won’t lie and say that the 1940 original is anywhere
near my top 10 list of Disney animated features, but I will admit that it at
least has its charms. The 2022 version, on the other hand, mostly involves
watching Hanks mumble unintelligibly in a bad Italian accent at pockets of thin
air that eventually had a puppet or a kitten painted over them in
post-production. None of the new material feels necessary, and all of the
familiar stuff simply makes you want to go watch the superior original instead.
It’s a boring, overlong slog where stuff just kinda happens at a glacial pace
that no child could possibly enjoy. Jiminy Cricket is mostly unnecessary, and
Monstro is now a tentacled sea monster for some reason. The moral at the end is
also completely different than in the original, opting for a lazy cliché about
being yourself that doesn’t really fit with what we just watched.
The only good things about this
reimagining is the admirable job Joseph Gordon-Levitt does at voicing the
iconic Jiminy Cricket (and Keegan-Michael Key as Honest John is pretty good,
although he’s not around for long), and the fact that Pinocchio himself could
have been infinitely more terrifying than he ended up being. This is
accomplished by making him a bit more cartoony than his surroundings,
which makes him less creepy but also makes him seem more… not really there. Not
once could I trick myself into believing that Pinocchio was an actual denizen
of the world that he was supposed to inhabit. Instead, all I constantly saw was
a humanoid CGI creation that was superimposed onto a background. Better that
than a semi-realistic Chucky-esque nightmare, I suppose. But just like the
“live action” Lion King before it, any flimsy reasoning behind this
film’s existence goes out the window when a scene rolls around that has the CGI
characters and no one else. We’ve seen this movie already. It came out over
eighty years ago. Another admittedly good thing about the film is that it made
me chuckle a couple of times, but jokes that land are still pretty
sparse.
So let me ask again… Why? Why fix
what ain't broken? At least this time the soulless rehash is free with
a Disney+ subscription. But do you know what else is? The original. Skip this
one and go watch that one again instead (or wait a few weeks for Guillermo del
Toro's infinitely more interesting-looking reimagining of Pinocchio on
Netflix). You won’t be missing much.
This review was first published in the Keizertimes on
September 23rd, 2022. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/
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