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CS
Weekly Archive > DVD
of the Day > 07/07/06
An Ocean of Familiarity
by hank spivak
Annapolis
Dave Collard
 
 
With a very by-the-numbers premise, executed in a very by-the-numbers way, Annapolis spins the yarn about a blue-collar kid named Jake (James Franco) who gains admission to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and then finds he has a problem with authority. In order to stay in the program, he enrolls in the Brigade Championships, a boxing competition where only the toughest survive. And of course, there’s a pretty lass (Jordana Brewster) whose heart he has to win. As far as predictability and rote storytelling, this movie’s got it in spades. The characters aren’t so much one-dimensional as they, like all the screenplay conventions around them, are extremely familiar. Everything in the film seems as if it has played in some context somewhere else: Jake’s Rocky-esque training montage, the stormy Officer and a Gentleman relationship Jake has with his superior officer, even the meet cute is borrowed beat for beat from Top Gun. That said, it does hit all of the necessary points (as recognizable as they may be) competently. The film isn’t necessarily poorly done—it’s just already been done. The extras offer a vast degree of insight into the Naval Academy as well as a filmmaker commentary that features the screenwriter, who cites some specific reasons for deleting and adding material from the original draft. It’s a shame when a studio thinks more outside the box about their supplementals than they do about the films themselves.
Annapolis
Touchstone Home Entertainment
Rated PG-13; 104 min.
$29.99
Buy it now
Hank Spivak started watching movies before he could walk. He lives, eats, breathes and sleeps them. One day he hopes to get rich off them.
Annapolis courtesy Touchstone Home Entertainment
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