Good hearted but not very wordly-wise, Dante is happy driving the school bus for a group of mentally handicapped children, while feeling he is somehow missing out on life and love. So he is very excited when after nearly being knocked down by her car he meets Maria, who seems immediately enamoured of him. He is soon invited to her sumptuous Palermo villa, little suspecting that this is part of a plot. He bears an amazing likeness to Maria's stool-pigeon gangster husband and it would be convenient for them if the mobster, in the shape of Dante, was seen to be dead and buried.
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Reviews
I love this movie so much
A lot of fun.
The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.
It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.
One of the best comedies of Benigni. A fable, grandiose, based on a game of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. This film demonstrates the skill and ability ironic and comic of this great actor and director. As usual, the vote fell just because this site has a tendency to raise the vote and to lower depending on the sympathy of those who download, the film unfairly over the Internet and then play to make the alleged critics. One of the masterpieces of Benigni, other than the cretinate who say that precedes the masterpieces like life is beautiful. The masterpiece is already that. And all the comedy turns to guilt of a banana.ahaha
A naive and shy school bus driver is a perfect match to a Mafioso who is wanted dead. Stecchino, his nickname, or Toothpick, is invited to Sicily for a holiday. The plan is to exploit the physical likeness of the two for killing him, so the Mafioso can take advantage of the others believing him dead...I think this is an excellent movie. I found it utterly hilarious, perhaps one of the funniest Italian movies ever. Of course the language is Italian, but there is the edition with English subtitles. But!!!... you gotta watch it in Italian. English subtitles totally spoil all the fun of the movie, and the jokes can NOT be translated. I don't recommend it to those who don't understand Italian.
I just watched the 1991 Italian movie "Johnny Stecchino" (or "Johnny Toothpick") on video. One of my all-time favorite films is "La Vita è bella" ("Life is Beautiful", 1997), another film that Roberto Benigni also directed, co-wrote, and played the lead role in. When I saw a preview of Benigni's comedy "Johnny Stecchino", I had to see the movie.Benigni is truly a gifted man with comic elements that remind me in this film of the Marx Brothers in physicality and Mr. Bean in amazing simple ignorance. He plays a dual role. As Dante, a bus driver for a group of retarded young adults, he is hopelessly clueless and the highlight of his daily routine seems to be playing a silly trick (every day?! won't the fruit sellers catch on?!) resulting in his stealing a banana for his breakfast. He also plays a mafioso type, Johnny Stecchino, who has snitched on his fellow criminals and is now hiding for fear of his life.Dante runs into lovely Maria (Nicoletta Braschi) who is really Johnny's wife, but she feigns an inexplicable attraction for Dante. She invites Dante to her grand villa in Palermo (Sicily), where we understand her true plot to have the lookalike simpleton killed so she can live happily with her Johnny.The film is a comedy of misunderstandings with scenes of stolen bananas, introducing a shocked Roman Catholic Cardinal to cocaine (mistakenly as a diabetic medicine), the two look-alikes running into each other and the criminal pretending to be a mirror to keep himself hidden, a group of seeming mafiosi being led by Dante in singing a children's song enunciating the sounds that various animals make (is this an inside Italian joke, as this reminds me of the 1991 Italian film "Caro Diario" - see <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0109382/usercomments-12> ?!), and more. Though I wish that Johnny didn't use offensive language, it was otherwise a zany and funny film showing off Benigni's comic genius. Santa Cleopatra!--Dilip Barman, May 21, 2004
7/10 I thoroughly recommend this film. Some jokes may go over the head of non-Italian speakers but it shouldn't really ruin your enjoyment of a classic Benigni film. My favourite scene was when "lo zio" (the uncle) was driving Dante back from Palermo train station and explaining the problems of Sicilian life to him - I nearly p*****d myself!