Good-hearted goofball Dante (Roberto Benigni) is hopelessly unlucky in love until the night he literally runs into the enigmatic Maria (Nicoletta Braschi). She seems instantly smitten with Dante and curiously fascinated with every facet of his look and demeanour. The next time they meet Maria takes Dante out on a shopping spree, ditching his shabby old clothes for designer duds. She also persuades him to adopt the habit of chewing on a toothpick. Eventually Maria invites Dante to spend a week at her palatial estate in Sicily. Dante is overjoyed but remains clueless as to what is really going on. For lurking in the basement is his identical double, Maria's toothpick-chewing gangster husband Johnny Stecchino (also Benigni), hiding from his mafia cronies who know he ratted them out to the cops. It appears Maria's plan is to get look-alike Dante assassinated so she and Johnny can escape to South America.
One wonders whether the late British writer-producer John Sullivan, creator of Only Fools and Horses, saw Johnny Stecchino as its plot is almost identical to a famous feature-length episode of Britain's most popular sitcom. Although much beloved in his native Italy Roberto Benigni remains a divisive figure among English speaking film fans. Detractors deride the manic mugging that is part and parcel of his irrepressibly childlike comic persona or else balk at his tendency to combine sentimentality with bad taste, most famously with his controversial holocaust comedy Life is Beautiful (1997). Benigni is a lot like the similarly divisive Jerry Lewis with whom he shares a number of traits as both an actor and director. Yet while Jerry came a-cropper with his attempt to milk the holocaust with the seemingly never-to-be-released The Day the Clown Cried (1972) Benigni's was an award-winning triumph and that is largely due to him being a more subtle and nuanced filmmaker.
Such qualities are also apparent here in Benigni's fourth film as writer, actor and director although again, as with Jerry Lewis, viewers have to wade through a fair amount of laboured, meandering skits before they get to the real comic gold. Benigni's frantic double-talk and rubber-faced gooning remain an acquired taste but a running gag about stolen bananas, Dante's fraudulent claim for disability allowance and the priceless moment he tries to ply a cardinal with cocaine make for some of the funniest moments in European comedy. The criminal double is a well worn comedic conceit and one Benigni handles effectively without settling for any obvious jokes. Along with establishing Dante as a lovably clueless innocent, Benigni exhibits considerable skill as a performer. His subtle performance establishes the scowling, mother-fixated Johnny as a distinctive separate persona with a strange aversion to kissing his girlfriend ("Kissing is for homosexuals!") Indeed one of the more interesting things about Johnny Stecchino is what it reveals about Italy's attitude towards the mafia. In one memorably evasive sequence, Benigni lambasts the mafia as a "blight on society" without once mentioning them by name. Interestingly, encounters with various ordinary citizens seem to suggest everyone in Sicily is more angry that Johnny is a stool-pigeon than a murderous gangster.
On the other hand, although Benigni pulls off several visual gags the film tends to meander through a number of elaborate but less-than-gut-busting skits. It is at its best as satire but the attempts at Chaplinesque pathos don't entirely come off, partly because Benigni's wife and regular leading lady Nicoletta Braschi proves an oddly diffident and underwhelming figure here. From her enigmatic intro right down to the cryptic fade-out Maria proves a profoundly 'ambiguous' heroine and frankly, rather scary.
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