Who remembers Better Luck Tomorrow? The 2002 film about the criminal lives of overachieving Asian-American high schoolers was thoughtful, memorable, and original, and its director, Justin Lin, was heralded as a rising star.
But his newest work, Annapolis cannot be accurately described as any of those things. What it could be called is hackneyed, uninteresting and thoroughly miserable for all not possessed of an unusually severe streak of masochism.
Jake Huard (James Franco) is a welder at a Maryland shipyard and amateur boxer. His deceased mother dreamed that one day he would attend the U.S. Naval Academy in nearby Annapolis, but his father (Brian Goodman) is, not unlike the viewer, generally disinclined to care.
One day, shockingly, Jake is accepted to Annapolis where he soon finds that the rigors of being a midshipman are severe indeed. He forms a bond with his rotund roommate "Twins" (Vicellous Reon Shannon) while flirting with superior officer Ali (Jordana Brewster) and making enemies with Lieutenant Cole (Tyrese Gibson). Cole also happens to be Jake's target in the Brigades boxing tournament held yearly at the Academy.
Everything in Annapolis has been done before. In fact, it is, to a great extent, a lesser remake of the terrific 1979 Academy Award winner Breaking Away. Annapolis is composed, essentially, of two clich8ed plotlines wrapped in a well-worn, feel-ood message: Down-home boy is underestimated, works his butt off, feels good about himself and gets the girl. The first plot is a lukewarm rehash of the opening 45 minutes of Full Metal Jacket with none of the intensity or cleverness of the Kubrick classic. Jake and comapny. get yelled at and do obstacle courses continually ,and the story moves along with the celerity of a dying animal trapped in quicksand. After that angle runs dry, Jake prepares for and fights in the Brigades tournament and performs exactly as one might expect. There is a training montage that thinks it is reminiscent of Rocky, but, in fact, evokes excitement more on the level of Rocky V, whose existence should probably be forgotten.
The performances in the film are uniformly mediocre and the production values inoffensive. The romance is well below par as Jake and Ali do little more than smile sweetly at each other. Frankly, a liaison between a naval cadet and an officer is almost certainly against regulations, but neither of the characters seems to care and nor do the people around them.
Unfortunately, though he is a physical specimen of some caliber, Jake happens to be dumb as a pole, which doesn't make for an interesting lead. The only multifaceted member of the cast is Twins, who benefits from the opportunity to deliver the film's one worthwhile piece of dialogue.
Perhaps, Annapolis could have found a saving grace in its fight scenes, but they were too few, too short, and too hard to watch. Decent fight scenes, particularly in the ring, require good editing as evidenced by the masterpiece that is Martin Scorsese's 1980 classic Raging Bull.
Annapolis cannot hold a candle; the fight footage is jerky and the angles literally all over the place. The sequences are so choppy that the visual impact is utterly nullified.
The creators tried to make up for we can't see by playing a thunderclap every time one of the combatants makes contact, but there is no blood, no obvious signs of real violence. The result is a combat sports film so emotionally stunted it could have been more engaging if composed entirely of midshipmen swabbing the head with a Q-tip.
The fact that Annapolis was released more than a year after production ended and that the trailer promises a film radically different from that which appeared in theaters suggests that the studio realized how big a flop this is.
Annapolis plays somewhat like an armed forces recruiting video. Our hero, a white man, rooms with Twins who is black, an Asian named Loo (Roger Fan) and a Hispanic named Estrada (Wilmer Calderon) implying that the Naval Academy is a PC haven for misguided youths to automatically shape up. While they're at it, they play games and pursue their attractive superior officers.
Never mind that the Navy is currently at war, a fact unmentioned in the course of the movie. The boxing is an obvious attempt to ape the recent success of better fight films like Million Dollar Baby and Cinderella Man written by someone who has probably never watched a boxing match in his life.
As Annapolis limps formulaically to its predetermined conclusion one cannot help but wonder why this movie was ever made at all. It clearly had a very little budget and was in low demand.
Now that it is here it will probably disappear quietly into obscurity, or perhaps be remembered as a catastrophic failure that wrecked an up-and-coming director's career. Either way, if you are seeking entertainment, don't go to Annapolis. It's a ghost town.
