The Super Mario Bros Movie’s starry cast is the latest in an increasing trend of picking the wrong kind of voice actors
The rumors of Chris Pratt’s badness have been greatly – well, maybe not greatly, but at least somewhat – exaggerated. When the first trailer for the upcoming Super Mario Bros Movie teased his vocal performance as the overall-clad plumber of 8-bit repute, fans began gnashing their teeth harder than a thicket of piranha plants, outraged to hear that he’d eschewed the character’s distinctive spicy-meat-a-ball accent in favor of a more dialed-back Noo Yawkah dialect. Which is fair enough, those little cries of wa-hoo! probably would’ve gotten old after an hour or so, not to mention the inevitable backlash from Italian anti-discrimination activists. The integral Mario-ness of his performance comes and goes, to the point that most of the time, he just sounds like Chris Pratt. He’s not horrible in the role, but there’s not really anything to recommend him as the right match for this specific character, either.
It’s not long before a viewer realizes that the overt presence of Pratt must have surely been the point of casting him, a notion more apparent in Anya Taylor-Joy’s minimal-effort line-reads as Princess Peach. She makes zero attempt to transform her voice, or to introduce a more animated quality to brighten up her normal speech. A charitable viewer might suggest that her slight smoker’s rasp befits the film’s baldfaced goal to present a less bubbly, more grounded take on the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom, but all the same, she doesn’t bring much to the table in terms of individual intangibles. These deficiencies in her and Pratt’s underwhelming approach to cartoonifying themselves jump right out whenever Jack Black’s Bowser occupies the screen, a glaring reminder of what good voice acting feels like. Cannily chosen for his boisterous roar capable of turning on a dime into an absurd little tenderness, Black massages a growly undercurrent into his readings and invites the supervillain’s Broadway-caliber theatricality to run away with him. He’s varied, he’s expressive and, most of all, he’s having fun.
