5. Jennifer Hale - Naomi Hunter (Metal Gear Solid 4)
What We Should Have Got: More Naomi Hunter! Jennifer Hale did a fantastic job in the original. She made Naomi sound smart, energetic, and sophisticated, and she really sold us on the emotional depth too. I could write all day about the ways in which Jennifer Hale did justice to the material she was given, but I want to select two things in particular that needed to come back in Metal Gear Solid 4, for reasons that may not be so obvious; a) a focused, sharp personality, and b) an interesting way of explaining things.
Why It Matters: Naomi needs to be articulate and carried away with her obsessions (whatever they are at the time), because that's what makes her such a great character for
exposition. Talking about how an imaginary virus deteriorates over time and interacts with T-cell receptors is guaranteed to be boring as hell unless the person explaining it seems fascinated. This is why Jeff Goldblum is so great at playing nerdy intellectuals. It's less about what he's saying and more how he says it; what his mannerisms says about his character, and how the energy transfers from his character to the audience -- whether we're paying attention to the details or not. Naomi Hunter did this in the first game when she explained the logic of "soldier genes" and "anti-freezing peptides", but here it's missing. Without the sharpness of the original Naomi, we stop caring what she says. That's a big problem for a character with as many speeches as Naomi.
What We Got: A few big things were beyond Hale's control, such as the idiotic decision to take away Naomi's British accent and the unwieldy script itself. But there was still room for a great performance here. I mean, how many characters get to cure cancer, confess to inventing immortality, seduce one of the main characters,
and commit suicide in a single performance? That's an acting jackpot if you ask me! Jennifer Hale should have found a way to make American-style Naomi energetic and familiar. She failed to do that, and it makes me wonder if the accent was all she had. If that's the case, it wouldn't be much of an insult to her. It may be a form of stereotyping, but accents come with "character" built right in: happy or sad, loud or quiet, we always know what somebody with
"that" kind of accent sounds like. It's really hard to act in your own voice, because it means you have to try simulating your real emotions; tapping into something deeper. Parody and exaggeration are easy; an accent is a kind of parody. I'm sure there are apologists who would defend her performance in MGS4, but there's a dead giveaway that Hale's lame performance is exactly that. All we have to do is look at The Twin Snakes, an updated version of MGS1 for the Nintendo Gamecube where her accent was first MIA. She plays the same character and reads the same lines, but suddenly her voice is monotone and boring. Fans hated it, and rightfully so. We can't help but picture Jennifer Hale casually scrolling through her Twitter feed on an iPhone while jogging through pages of script.