REVIEW: Pinocchio 2022

Here’s my Pinocchio review which stars Tom Hanks, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Cynthia Erivo, Luke Evans and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth and more.

Tom Hanks as Geppetto in PINOCCHIO, exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. © 2022 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Ok so this film is an adaptation of the classic Disney version of Pinocchio and they got the aesthetics down pat from the look of their version of Pinocchio to Tom Hanks as the woodcutter Gepetto to the whole nine yards for the movie. And while the animated film has already been out for decades let me raise the SPOILER ALERT for this Pinocchio review.

So let’s break it down to the good and the bad.

The Good

• Great take for Gepetto by Tom Hanks. I truly needed a palate cleanser after his great but at the same time despicable performance as Elvis Presley’s manager Colonel Tom Parker in WB’s Elvis biopic. So this was a fresh light for the lovable Hollywood guy.
• Again I found the whole aesthetics for the film great, as expected from Disney, it did give a bigger scope of Pinocchio’s world that the animated film didn’t really give us back then.
• Cynthia Erivo’s Blue Fairy was proof that race isn’t important if the role fits you.
• Keegan Michael Key as Honest John was so nice. I loved that guy and I was actually waiting for him to bust out a “Jay-Kwe-Lin”

• • It may be divisive, but I liked the new Monstro. The classic version was scary as hell but this one felt like it came from the depths of hell. It’s a huge creature with fins that looks like wings, truly the stuff of terror.
  • They retained the song “I’ve Got No Strings”…

Which was turned extra creepy by James Spader’s take on Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

The Bad

• Man oh man, this felt more of cash grab rather than a nice tribute to the original. It felt soulless, which is ironic because we’re telling the story of a wooden boy who went on an adventure to become a real boy, hence get a soul.
• Disney nerfed the scary bits of the classic version, which I really wanted to see. Maybe partly because of their outlook or because the original was too damn scary, so they had to tone it down. But I honestly believe that they should have kept those bits there as a cautionary tale for kids.
• The script was bad too.

Follow me on Twitter at @thefanboyseo for more geek news and updates.