I almost don’t have the energy to really complain about this “live action” remake of Pinocchio. I don’t particularly like Disney’s original animated film and I’m perplexed why there are so many Pinocchio movies coming out (including Del Toro’s and the, ahem, Pauley Shore one from earlier).

But, even then, I’m perplexed to see Robert Zemeckis as the director. Sure, he’s done some off-putting animated films, but he’s usually better at crafting a story and sequences than this. This film is just… boring. So boring. I dozed off three or four times and had to repeatedly rewind Disney+ (which is surprisingly unstable, at least on a Samsung Smart TV).

So the flick is a visual and story remake of the classic Disney property… only now with “road apples” and some meta comedy from the cricket. It’s got a very discordant art style with Tom Hanks as a human, a CGI kitten, a semi-realistic cricket face, a marionette that artistically looks hand-drawn, and the human-like CGI fox and cat baddies. In pure hand-drawn animated form, this isn’t weird… but try to make it more realistic and things just don’t compute visually. This is just all over place.

Plus the plot is just a bunch of random noise… but I guess that’s Pinocchio… and I didn’t care much for it way back when so why would I like it now? If Zemeckis had injected more than the occasional meta joke, then maybe it’d have grown past its source material.

I was just bored by this pointless and odd endeavor. I have no energy to bag on it… it’s just so bland and creatively bankrupt.

Score: 66