3. Khary Payton - Drebin 893 (Metal Gear Solid 4)
What We Should Have Got: Drebin is a smirking arms dealer with a hairless pet monkey that wears a diaper and drinks cola. He's got plenty of bling, dyes his hair bright white, and sports a blazer to go with his camouflage pants and army boots. He's already become rich exploiting the war economy, and doesn't have any ideology to speak of. In other words, he's a sleazy war profiteer who doubles as comic relief. You wouldn't expect him to have a very serious way of talking, but Kojima gave the character some extremely weighty exposition as well, and judging by the animation, he's supposed to be cool and savvy too. That's a lot to juggle. He gives Snake a ton of insider information about how the "system" works, for example, and then shoos away his ugly squawking chimpanzee. More than anything, we needed Drebin to be charismatic. Hitting the same notes over and over doesn't work for such long speeches. We needed a dynamic performance that kept us guessing.
Why It Matters: Metal Gear Solid 4 is a pretty depressing story, with our favorite hero becoming an old geezer with only a few months to live and the world turned upside down by meaningless war, so we could use somebody like Drebin to be a fresh breeze in a suffocating plot. The silly monkey and magic show antics are a way to break up the melodrama, obviously, but the real key is Khary Payton's performance itself. Without that breeze, things get stuffy and boring.
What We Got: Sadly, the same old cadence, over and over. Cadence is the flow of a person's speech, the inflection and tone of their voice; basically how it sounds when you hear to the "sound" more than the "words". Khary Payton used a rhythm that was fine for a few grinning one-liners, but stretched out over a few minutes at a time it just doesn't work. His false raspiness evoked some classic jazz vibes, I guess, but there wasn't any variety, so it became another example of cartoon acting. In the end, Drebin's stories about the history of the B&B members are agonising to listen to. Eventually, all we hear is "blah, blah, blah", ready to skip the conversation altogether. That's a hint that your performance sucks.