PLOT: A blue-collar guy is accepted into the Naval Academy at Annapolis and must fight to prove that he's a suitable person to eventually boss around cannon fodder.
Annapolis is a large, formulaic lump of soggy toilet paper from the lithium school of filmmaking -- no ups, no downs, just blah, blah, blah.
The story is An Officer And A Gentleman meets Rocky but with worse dialogue. Go ahead, think about that. Your brain will explode.
James Franco stars as Jake Huard, a blue-collar shipbuilder whose late mother always hoped he'd attend the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md.
Fat chance. The Academy gets 50,000 applications a year and accepts only 1,200 of the best, the brightest and the ones who were away the day American foreign policy was studied.
But Franco's character is accepted at Annapolis!!! Still, there are grave doubts all around that this lad can make it. His school marks aren't great. He's not very disciplined. He says goodbye to his regular working-stiff dad and all his regular working-stiff friends, all of whom doubt his ability to stick it out at Marine school.
Soon he enters the rigorous world of armed-forces training, with all the requisite yelling, personal degradation, tough exercise segments and all the other camouflage-clad cliches.
At Annapolis, there's a cute girl officer (Jordana Brewster) and two mean officers (Tyrese Gibson, here directed to glare and flare his nostrils and McCaleb Burnett as a racist creep).
Franco's character has one Puerto Rican roommate, one Asian roommate and one African American roommate; there's a lot of equal-opportunity bonding and buddy stuff. Meanwhile, the officers scream a lot and get right in all the new guys' faces.
The Marines-in-training and the officers act on their mutual hostility in the boxing ring. So there's boxing. With boxing you get skipping-rope segments and weigh-ins and jabbing and hooking and dodging and weaving and any other visual boxing cliche we might have missed, because certainly the filmmakers didn't miss any.
Anyway, you'll never believe it, but the James Franco character proves his mettle in the end.
Annapolis, which has terrible music, dialogue and acting and looks like dirt, was not filmed in Annapolis but rather Philadelphia. According to the Baltimore Sun, the original plan to shoot at Annapolis was scrapped when the Naval Academy objected to the script. This suggests that the Navy actually read the thing, a gesture someone might suggest to James Franco's agent.
BOTTOM LINE: Annapolis isn't the worst movie ever made. Or maybe it is.
(This film is rated PG)
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