That's the thing though. Regardless if it's just a bunch of one-liners or not, the OG voice actor, Charles Martinet is iconic for a reason. He's been doing the voice for well over 20 years himself. He also voiced Luigi, Wario, and Waluilgi too.
en.m.wikipedia.org
It's the same reason that nobody else can be Dante, but Ruben Langdon. Even though he only started voicing the character at the start of the DMC3. Or why Alyssa Court is considered the definitive Claire Redfield. She brought charming energy no other voice actors of Claire brought to the scene. Her replacements have done decent jobs, but I told to the extent and how long she's been doing it. Up to that point, Claire's had the most consistent voice actor for the Resident Evil series. A series known for replacing voice actors on the dime.
Pedant. You're comparing characters who's dialogue is actually important to the story, dialogue that has built the characters and had substantive impacts to their respective stories. Martinet is just "the guy who says the things people expect Mario to say." Given how other video games have been mishandled in their transition to screen, I think, if nothing else, their doing an animation and not attempting to live-action a story about a plumber, princess and lizard when there's not enough there to merit such an outing is enough. Am I saying Pratt is the
right choice? I don't know. What I AM saying is it doesn't really matter.
They're not allowing Mario to sell himself as a character. The reason Chris Pratt as Mario is so laughable isn't even so much that it's a miscast - Pratt can be goofy and innocent when he needs to be, I mean, look at The Lego Movie - it's that they're tying such a huge Hollywood name to something as quaint as Mario. I never expected Charles Martinet to voice Mario in the movie, atleast not with the voice he usually does, since that would get highly annoying after the first 10 minutes. But with Pratt as the voice of Mario, along with some of the other voice cast, you know where this is going.
When they made the Wallace and Gromit movie they kept the tone of that world and its characters intact; Neither Wallace nor Gromit were shoved through the Hollywood grinder to make them more palatable - or what the suits think is more palatable - to American audiences. Not that the Mario franchise is as easy to pin down as something like Wallace and Gromit, but everything about this Mario movie and Illumination being set to create it screams shallow Hollywood branding. But then I guess Mario himself has been in shallow mobile games too, so eh.
Another point of contention regarding the voice cast is how obvious the "humor" is going to be. You just know every comedic beat Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong is going to hit, and it's depressing that just by knowing the voice cast we already know exactly what to expect from this movie before we've even seen a single frame of it.
Agreed; this was a purely Hollywood move. But Mario doesn't need to sell himself, and let's be honest: what is his character? A plumber that jumps on creatures and collects stars to rescue a princess from a lizard? What kind of motivation does an actor require to do that ankle-deep level of depth justice? He's arguably one of the most recognizable videogame characters in history; he doesn't NEED to sell himself. People who don't' even play videogames know who he he is, and what character traits does he require in a film adaptation to be recognized as himself? But the counter-argument then mandates that their intentionally underselling the Mario character with a lesser, no-name actor would have been itself an equal level of disingenuousness. Pick your poison.
Just saying, film adaptations of iconic video game brands are ALWAYS going to draw out the ire of fanatics, and Pratt, while maybe not the
best choice could easily be the least offensive move if the movie sucks as much shit as it easily could (and might.) Pratt is an actor; his job is to pretend to be people he's not. If they put a script in front of him and tell him to say "thank you so much for to playing my game" in a put-on Italian accent, he might very well be capable of it. Just because it's not the guy who did it first in the '90s isn't a de facto miscasting. I may not like Pratt, but he does have range. The
best range? No. But I think him perfectly capable of not completely fucking a script about a "story" so far-fetched as to be best described as a nigh 40-year-old fever dream.
