Roberto Benigni’s ‘Pinocchio’ at 20: The Rare Movie That Fully Deserves Its 0% Rotten Tomatoes Rating

It’s a common lament among film lovers: “____ is such a great movie, so why is Hollywood remaking it?” Alas, those complaints tend to fall on deaf ears: In our age of reboots and redos, studios have decided that the smart money is on selling audiences a new version of something they already love. After all, why take a chance on the unknown when the masses will happily choose the familiar?

That strategy continued last week, when Robert Zemeckis’ live-action Pinocchio debuted to Disney+. The Mouse House has been doing this a lot lately, mining the vaults to remake its animated classics. (If you liked The Lion King as a cartoon, you’ll probably like it just as much with “real” lions, warthogs and birds, right?) But for those who adore the 1940 Pinocchio, one of Disney’s all-time greatest animated films, this particular redo job seems especially gross. But even though the Zemeckis film, which stars Tom Hanks and Cynthia Erivo, is a critical dud, it’s not even close to being the worst Pinocchio ever made. Roberto Benigni got there first, 20 years ago.

There wasn’t any reason to assume Benigni’s Pinocchio would be terrible. The beloved actor-turned-filmmaker was riding high in the late 1990s, thanks to his daring Holocaust comedy-tearjerker Life Is Beautiful, which won multiple Oscars, including Best Actor for Benigni. A comedy legend in his native Italy, Benigni was known in the States mostly from his work in Jim Jarmusch’s indie films, but Life Is Beautiful — this country’s second-highest-grossing movie in a non-English language — made him a household name. “Life is Beautiful really changed my life a lot and I had many, many offers,” he said in 2021, later adding, “I had a lot of pressure, of course. … What I really loved was that I could decide what I wanted to do [next], and then do it.”

Benigni used his newfound clout to mount an ambitious adaptation of Pinocchio, the most expensive film in Italian history. Drawing from the same source material as the 1940 Disney film, Carlo Collodi’s 1880s book The Adventures of Pinocchio, Benigni sought to craft a grand live-action fairytale for kids which chronicled the saga of a puppet who comes to life and gets into all kinds of trouble. But then Benigni decided he’d play the boyish Pinocchio, even though he turned 50 shortly after the film came out. “This was my last chance for me,” he explained when Pinocchio opened over Christmas in 2002. “I am too old. Otherwise I am ready to play Geppetto.”

To be fair to Benigni, just about no one in this country has seen the original version of his Pinocchio. Dumped into U.S. theaters by Miramax without advance screenings or much promotion, Pinocchio was hastily dubbed into English and recut after opening in Italy a few months earlier. If you try to rent Benigni’s Pinocchio now through any of the major digital services, it appears you’re stuck with the bastardized U.S. cut. But although some American critics have a few mildly kind things to say about the Italian version, this doesn’t sound like a case of a masterpiece being hacked to pieces by a thoughtless U.S. distributor. More likely, Benigni’s English-dubbed Pinocchio is a bad movie made unimaginably worse by some disastrous alterations. Not “So bad you have to see it” bad. Not “This is a fascinating train wreck” bad. We’re talking the kind of listlessly bad that makes you want to swear off movies for a while. Maybe going outside and getting some exercise really is a better way to spend your free time.

Incorporating plot elements from the Collodi novel that the Disney film ignored, Benigni places himself front and center as Pinocchio, who the sweet-natured Geppetto (played by Carlo Giuffrè, dubbed by David Suchet) carves out of a magical log that literally rolls through town one day. Remarkably, though, everyone in this quaint Italian community seems absolutely blasé about encountering this walking, talking puppet. That’s even more extraordinary considering this supposed boy looks like a middle-aged man with a receding hairline — albeit one who maniacally jumps around and whines like a little kid.

You may remember that, last year, many critics took issue with Ben Platt playing a teenager in the movie version of Dear Evan Hansen — well, that’s nothing compared to how deeply creepy Benigni’s performance is as Pinocchio. Often a whirling dervish on talk shows or awards ceremonies, Benigni in his public appearances radiates big-kid energy that, depending on your temperament, is either incredibly endearing or utterly insufferable. (By the end of the Life Is Beautiful award season, Benigni’s boisterous demeanor started to feel like grating shtick.) Well, Pinocchio saw him ramp up the incessant adorableness to lethal levels. Indeed, the film’s most strained bit of make-believe isn’t that he’s made of wood but that he’s a child.

That would have been difficult to swallow in any version. But the U.S. cut has the added detriment of the main character being dubbed by Breckin Meyer, who was then a staple of teen comedies such as Clueless and Road Trip. Initially, Benigni had tried to dub his character into English using his own voice, but “It didn’t work,” he later said. “Two hours with this thick Italian accent was too risky. And somebody could think that I won an Academy Award and now I try to act in English. It sounds preposterous.” Maybe, but it wasn’t any more preposterous than hearing Meyer’s aggressively gee-willikers speaking style coming out of Benigni’s mouth. This Pinocchio is meant to be insolent and immature, a kid who makes mistakes and acts rashly, but who ultimately proves to have a good heart. But in reality, this is the only Pinocchio in which you actively pray that the puppet gets pulverized. Meyer’s over-caffeinated enthusiasm mixed with Benigni’s forced cutesiness is just too much to take.

Costing about $45 million in U.S. dollars, this Pinocchio spent lavishly on production design and effects, all in a vain attempt to give the film a picture-book magic, but everything is weighed down by Benigni’s poisonous whimsy, his crushing confidence that he’s such a lovable scamp. If Life Is Beautiful tested the limits of just how smarmy he could be in a serious setting, Pinocchio very much felt like the work of a man supremely pleased with himself, which negatively affects everything around Benigni. The movie’s slapstick is leaden. The Blue Fairy, played by his longtime wife and frequent collaborator Nicoletta Braschi (later dubbed by Glenn Close), inexplicably finds everything Pinocchio does utterly delightful. (There’s also a weird, slightly disconcerting romantic spark between her and this boy puppet.) And any hope of interesting supporting players is squashed by the American and English actors who dub over the Italian performers. Kevin James, Cheech Marin, Eddie Griffin, John Cleese, Topher Grace, Queen Latifah, Regis Philbin, Jim Belushi, Eric Idle: In this context, their recognizable voices are like daggers through the ears, a chorus of men and women shouting inane dialogue that feels like it’s been spit out awkwardly from Google Translate rather than sensitively modified to fit a new language.

The film bombed in the U.S., effectively killing the commercial momentum Benigni had established with Life Is Beautiful. A few years later, he made the poorly-received The Tiger and the Snow, in which he portrayed a poet in Iraq just as the U.S. is invading the country — critics noted the similarities to Life Is Beautiful — and hasn’t directed a film since. But he hasn’t let go of Pinocchio: In fact, in 2019, he signed on to Gomorrah director Matteo Garrone’s live-action Pinocchio, this time playing, ironically enough, Geppetto. “He’s a wonderful director. So, I decided to say yes when he asked me to play the father,” Benigni later said. “The story is so wonderful and so popular. In Italy, the film was a big success because it’s the most popular story in Italy. I’m just in love with the story and I’m so happy that I did this movie. It’s a good story for everybody, children and parents. Everybody can be moved by it.”

Filmmakers sometimes respond to a colossal success with an overblown follow-up, falling flat on their face in the process. (Think of Kevin Costner returning to the director’s chair after Dances With Wolves with The Postman.) But Benigni’s Pinocchio debacle seemed especially titanic and tragic. Benigni had had a special affinity for Collodi’s fable since he was a boy — “When I left my village, I didn’t want to be an actor,” he claimed, “I wanted to be Pinocchio” — and for many years prior to Life Is Beautiful, his dream was to make the film alongside Federico Fellini, perhaps his country’s most celebrated director. But when he finally got his chance, the resulting movie turned out to be a major disappointment, despite getting okay reviews in Italy and winning some awards there. In America, though, it’s an infamous flop, one of only a few films to suffer the indignity of getting a perfect 0% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Over the years, there have been other Pinocchios that have been ridiculed — recently, there was an animated Russian remake, Pinocchio: A True Story, with Pauly Shore (!) dubbing the voice of the title character — but Benigni’s version, because of its maker’s reputation and the completeness of its failure, stands alone.

Tim Grierson (@timgrierson) is the senior U.S. critic for Screen International. A frequent contributor to Vulture, Rolling Stone and the Los Angeles Times, he is the author of seven books, including his most recent, This Is How You Make a Movie.