At some point, we might just have to admit Pinocchio is a shitty story. I mean you can Robert Zemeckis the heck out of this thing and even add Tom Hanks and still get the queasies. In essence, Pinocchio is just second-rate Garden of Eden fiction. And lemme tell ya, the Garden of Eden –while common knowledge to many- is hardly on The Bible’s greatest hits album.
Our Italian God, Gepetto (Hanks) has an obsession with clocks; such allows Zemeckis to recreate the “late-for-school” moment from Back to the Future, which, admittedly, was clever … as were several of the Disney-themed cuckoo clocks (my favorite was the one featuring Woody from Toy Story; is Disney having fun with us? Yes). Late at night, by which I mean 6 PM, apparently, Gepetto kneels beside his bed and makes a wish upon a star. This causes Cynthia Erivo to breeze on a cloud of CGI and make Gepetto’s wooden puppet Pinocchio into a living being.
Despite being alive for all of thirty seconds, Pinocchio (voice of Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) can already walk, talk, and endure a massive guilt trip. Gepetto wants a real boy, a carrot that is dangled in front of this knotty pine, but to reach boyhood status, the animated towel rack has gotta play by the rules. Don’t partake of the apple, Adam-occhio. Is that truly a fair test of somebody who would have to have been alive past midnight to be born yesterday? Perhaps all humanoids have a natural sense of right and wrong, but do they all naturally have a sense of good and bad as well? I think this is asking far too much.
So, seriously, your wooden puppet comes to life and what do you do … well, send him to school, of course. By himself (itself). Yeah, I’ve seen three different versions of Pinocchio in the past two years and I’m convinced this just isn’t a good story. But wait! Wait until Pinocchio gets stolen by the evil puppet master! Does that make the tale better? How about the part where the blockhead who can’t become a boy actually does start turning into an ass? All because why? He fell into a wagon full of children out for an adventure.
What’s the puppet supposed to do?
“No, I don’t want to go to “Pleasure Island” with rides and candy and soda pop and laughter and fun and other 
children. I want to return to living in a one-room shack only populated by the weird guy who takes his goldfish for a walk. Yeah, that’s a reasonable choice.
I realize Pinocchio represents not just a massive splinter, but all children in a sense. Well, Pinocchio and his disembodied conscience, Jiminy Cricket (Joseph-Gordon Levitt). So, in a sense, the fate of Pinocchio is bigger than some painted kindling. Yet still, I ask you are we really to believe that Pinocchio is better served by never indulging his curiosity? I am reminded that Eve partakes the apple of KNOWLEDGE. If the choice is blissful ignorance or miserable intuition, I side with the latter. You don’t have to be a sinner to make that call.
The Robert Zemeckis Pinocchio does have its moments: I enjoyed the carnival-like atmosphere of Pleasure Island before it became Lord of the Flies. I enjoyed the clocks and I even tolerated Tom Hanks for the most part. I will not call Hanks a miscast as much as, well, perhaps not the role that will appear on the cover of the his biography. But the more I see Pinocchio, the harder it is to like this story. I don’t necessarily think this version is any worse than the others – in fact, I think it might be the best; I found myself more sympathetic with this Pinocchio than any other. Still, there just isn’t enough fun here to justify the hype.
Gepetto was hangin’ out in his hoodie
When some magic made the man scream, “Oh goody!”
This puppet, a boy?
Or a Story of Toy
Maybe a chip off the Hanks block of Woody
Rated PG, 105 Minutes
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Writer: Robert Zemeckis, Chris Weitz
Genre: Recycled crap
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Wooden boys?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Those who continue to suffer with this mediocre narrative
