Annapolis is the perfect movie for someone who has never before seen one. The film is aggressive in its attempt to hit as many clichés as possible in its running time, while shamelessly cribbing – and occasionally flat out ripping off – other, better movies. The only interesting character arc in the whole thing is the audience’s, as they travel from boredom to disbelief to outright mockery.
James Franco is a rough young man who overcomes his working class roots to enter the US Navy’s Officer School at Annapolis. Franco is frozen inside his James Dean impersonation like a prehistoric bug in amber – he’s so completely into the slouch and the mumble that he disappears for most of the film. James Franco seems to have discovered invisibility, as every other character in the film steps up and becomes more interesting than his hero.
Franco works as a riveter in what appears to be a Levis ad, just across the water from Annapolis. He had promised his dead mother that he would get in one day, but his dead end life just involves building battleships and fighting in area smokers. There’s hope, though – one day a sketchily characterized Navy officer shows up and tells Franco that he got into Annapolis on the wait list. I am pretty sure we’re supposed to understand that this Navy officer, played by an exhausted Donnie Wahlberg, came from the same world as Franco. I am not sure that we’re supposed to care.
In Annapolis Franco runs into the a bizarre combination of Lords of Discipline, An Officer and a Gentleman and Rocky and Raging Bull – he’s a loner who doesn’t take well to authority, wouldn’t you know, and he’s intent on fighting in the big Brigades, a school-wide boxing tournament of some sort.
At school Franco is plopped into the middle of the multiculti dorm room – there’s a Hispanic guy who thinks with his dick, an Asian guy who’s by the books and math smart and a big fat black guy, who just flat out shouldn’t have been able to get into the school, but was able to apply for a special Plot Hole from his local Congressman. Fattie and Franco will end up being a team as Franco learns the value of friends and teamwork and Fattie learns how to climb the monkey bars in under five minutes or get kicked out of school.
Then there are Franco’s commanding officers – Tyrese plays a Marine back from the Gulf who is working at Annapolis (I don’t exactly understand why. He goes back at the end), and who is tough and mean and awful and – surprise! – really all about making the best officers he can. Oh, and he boxes. Have you figured out the climax? There’s a guy who’s totally a prick who only exists to present a little bit of a bad guy. And then there’s Jordana Brewster, in her Demi Moore from A Few Good Men drag, playing the female officer who exists only to kiss Franco at the end of the picture.
Director Justin Lin has style, but little else. It doesn’t help that the script is by a guy who wrote some episodes of The Family Guy, and its adherence to saggy cliché makes the whole thing feel a bit like a parody from that show. Still, Lin seems happy to just obvious event after obvious event play out. If only he had the balls that the films he was ripping off had – there’s the prerequisite suicide by the failed plebe here, but while Lords of Discipline took it all the way, Annapolis is content to just make it a failed attempt. You get the idea, and none of that messy emotion!
The truth is that Lin is making a very long commercial. There are lots of montages, with pumping rock music (strangely almost none of it seems to be real songs, but a score in the form of nu-metal and late 90s style techno), and some nice shots – but they all look like he’s selling something. Probably the best shot in the film has Franco in a locker room whose faltering fluorescent light creates a strobe effect as he spars with the air at different film speeds – but the whole thing feels like maybe a commercial for a brokerage (“We fight for your money”). On one level Annapolis is a commercial for the Navy (a commercial which is strangely disconnected from the fact that there is actual fighting going on these days. Some lip service is paid to a man who died “over there,” but it’s more about meeting the required conventions of the military training movie than bothering to acknowledge that there’s a real world), but on another it’s a commercial for Lin. The whole thing feels like a clip reel, loosely connected by the same actors playing ostensible characters throughout. Lin has to sell himself on his sizzle, since he has no steak – and possibly no soul.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with clichés – they often got that way for a reason, and many great films are layered with cheese and cliché. But these great films also have something else going on, a talent or a passion or even a point of view. Annapolis is the kind of movie that could play on a TV screen in a Best Buy without sound and if you passed by it three or four times in an hour, you would have no problem figuring out everything that was happening – not because Lin’s storytelling is so stunningly sharp but because you’ve seen every frame before.