James Franco as Jake Huard
Tyrese Gibson as Cole
Jordana Brewster as Ali
Donnie Wahlberg as Lt. Cmdr. Burton
Vicellous Reon Shannon as Twins
Roger Fan as Loo
Wilmer Calderon as Estrada
McCaleb Burnett as Whitaker
Jim Parrack as A.J.
Brian Goodman as Bill Huard
Katie Hein as Risa
Chi McBride as Coach McNally
Review:
Jake Huard (James Franco) has spent his whole life looking across the bay at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, wondering if he’s good enough to go, good enough to become a United States Naval Officer. After years of waiting his perseverance pays off and he finally gets a chance to brave the rigors of Annapolis.
Which is strange when it turns out “Annapolis” is a sports film, and mediocre one at that – hitting all the sports film standards – as Jake spends a fair portion of the film training for the inter-brigade boxing tournament as a means of asserting his self-worth.
There are the usual tropes about perseverance and buried deep within are some insights into what it takes to be a good officer, and the responsibility of the instructors to be as hard as possible to weed out potential bad officers. But “Annapolis” doesn’t bother to do much more than trot the ideas out, never mind developing them, before it returns to being a fairly unoriginal and uninspired sports film which could still have been salvaged with charismatic actors or witty dialogue, but unfortunately has neither.
“Annapolis” has the seeds of a good, if derivative, film in it, but gives that up in favor of being a mediocre boxing film.
