Quit hiring "famous" people to play in video game movies. Hire unknowns that match the parts and use the original voice actors for the CGI characters. Claptrap should have been played by Claptrap! Mario should be played by Mario!
Hire unknowns that match the parts and use the original voice actors for the CGI characters.
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I did enjoy Chris Pratt's Mario, which was unexpected. I don't know about Jack Black's performance in Borderlands, but he was good as Bowser.
I also don't know how much of their voices were manipulated however.
Look, I love the guy, but 90 minutes of Charles Martinet wahoo-ing through the Mario movie would be completely unwatchable. There's a reason Mario almost never says more than a few words at a time.
Charles Martinet has range, he can tone it down. I actually think he voiced the Italian version.
Didn't the guy who originally played claptrap quit the games or something?
Essentially.
The longer version is David Eddings was the Vice President of Business Development at Gearbox, and voiced Claptrap in Borderlands and Borderlands 2, for either very little or no extra pay. He left Gearbox, and CEO Randy Pitchford said some things about Eddings in an interview which led to a back-and-forth Twitter argument, allegations of assault and fraud against Pitchford, and a lawsuit. It was all big news while it happened but I can't find much info now about where it landed, except that Gearbox found somebody else to voice Claptrap after that.
I was kinda hoping they'd work things out and get him for the movie, but, alas...
What an embarrassing failure stuffed full of past their prime burnouts.
The movie wasn't great either.
Cue the Statler and Waldorf laughter
Borderlands without the gameplay sucks. Who saw that one coming? Everyone.
They could have crafted a serviceable plot out of what the games provided....if they cared. It would never be The Last of Us, but the bar is set so low for things now. I would be perfectly fine with well written movies with B list actors. But that's the problem with these movies, no one cares enough, and all the money gets poured into getting recognizable actors to play parts that they aren't suited for.
This was my first thought back when they announced the film. I love the Borderlands games, but they're like 90% proc-gen guns and bullet-sponge enemies, and 10% narrative. Without a dramatically punched up story, this movie was doomed from the start to be a hammy Hollywood version of a "Let's Play" video.
