When you wish upon a star, makes no difference where you are. Unless, that is, you're at Roberto Benigni's wooden new Pinocchio.

That's one place you don't want to be.

The Miramax film opened Christmas Day without being screened for critics, a bad sign on so many levels. And the film lives up - or, rather, down - to the expectations of this peek-a-boo marketing strategy.

The puppet may finally come to life, but the movie never does.

Speaking of expectations: Nobody expected this live-action Pinocchio to equal the 1940 Disney version, the best Disney animated feature ever made and one of the best films of any kind. On the other hand, we did expect director/co-writer/star Benigni (Life Is Beautiful) to deliver a film that's much livelier and more amusing than this listless, ill-conceived fiasco.

Benigni's idea of going back to the original 1883 novel, written by Italian journalist Carlo Collodi, and making a sort of classic version of the book is intriguing. But that is apparently the last decent idea the filmmaker had.

The basic story is not so different from the one we know through Disney: Kindly old Geppetto carves a puppet out of wood and the wooden boy, called Pinocchio, begins talking and moving on its own. The puppet is selfish and reckless. But through a series of harrowing adventures - and with the help of a Blue Fairy and a talking cricket - Pinocchio develops a more noble character and earns a chance to become a real, live boy.

Even if Benigni's version of the book were more engaging, and even if the pacing were not so glacial, there would still be some unfortunate strings attached.

For one thing, there's Benigni in the title role. It is very hard to accept as a child a man of 50 who does nothing to hide his receding hairline or his height.

It's also tough to accept him as a puppet: There is nothing especially puppetlike in his appearance or in the way he moves. Couldn't Benigni, a gifted clown elsewhere, at least have drawn a couple of lines down the sides of his mouth to indicate a hinge?

Or something?

The willing suspension of disbelief is a wonderful thing. And yet you can not simply declare that you are a puppet child and expect the world to go along with you.

The makeup for the other characters is similarly minimal, which in a little-theater production might have been charming. But in a major motion picture that includes some fairly sophisticated special effects (such as Pinocchio's famous lie-inspired nose elongation), the lack of similarly substantial makeup and costumes is only confusing.

Sometimes less really is less. And the problems don't end there.

Although Pinocchio is G-rated and largely aimed at children, an unmistakably morbid tone hangs over certain scenes. At one point, for example, we witness the grisly spectacle of our puppet pal hanging from a noose in front of a big, E.T. moon. The fact that the wooden Pinocchio does not ultimately seem to be harmed by this hanging only slightly lessens the disturbing impact of the image.

While we're discussing children, there is also the dicey matter of the dubbing.

The movie was filmed in Italian, but subtitles are impractical because so much of the potential audience is made up of kids. So we're stuck with dubbing, and it's very distracting.

The bottom line is that the studio's marketing strategy is just a tad incomplete. Instead of hiding Pinocchio from critics, Miramax should have hidden it from everyone.

Jay Boyar is a movie critic for the Orlando Sentinel, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.

Pinocchio

Starring Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Carlo Guiffre; voices of Breckin Meyer, Glenn Close, David Suchet, John Cleese

Directed by Roberto Benigni

Released by Miramax

Rated G

Time: 1 hour, 48 minutes