Annapolis: Critic Reviews

Compellingly reserved and inscrutable at the start, Franco starts to lose us by the second hour ...

Annapolis is so gung-ho about the United States Naval Academy's ability to turn boys into fighting men and rebels into scrappy team players that it could easily be confused with a military recruiting film.

Annapolis moves at a decent clip, but it's all cliches ...

The only impressive thing about it is the monotony and thoroughness with which it replicates cliches from older, better movies and hammers them into pop alloy to an up-with-me beat beat beat of its musical score.

Annapolis is more entertaining than any Navy recruitment ad ought to be.

Jake [is] forced to swallow his pride and ask girly Brewster to train him. It's a marginally subversive moment in a movie that otherwise falls in line.

A record number of movie cliches are strung together for the otherwise forgettable boot-camp drama Annapolis.

Annapolis is as predictable as stale bread. You can plot the film's conclusion, oh, at about the midway point. Even the few plot twists can be guessed miles away.

Annapolis leaves you vaguely seasick from unearned adrenaline. The editing works to make the climaxes sharp, but in the end your stomach is too empty to keep it all down.

... an exhausted wheeze of bankrupt cliches and cardboard characters, the kind of film that has no visible reason for existing, except that everybody got paid.

There's a good movie to be made about a townie who tests his mettle against the local elites. Plenty of films exploiting this time-honored premise tend to push the right audience buttons. But the Annapolis script is less a script than a checklist.

Much as I enjoyed screenwriter Dave Collard's freshman effort, Out of Time, there's not much to say about his sophomore (and sophomoric) screenplay, which seems to have gleaned its insights from the fortune-cookie factory.

Apparently the filmmakers are counting on viewers not remembering An Officer and a Gentleman, which seems fairly unlikely. Then again, the plot is so predictable that no prior knowledge is necessary to figure out where it's going.

Competently made but painfully similar to a plethora of films that have come before it, Annapolis is simply too familiar to land any real punches.

Actually, the lyrics to In the Navy are more sophisticated than Annapolis, which was assembled by the handy-dandy Disney make-a-movie kit and is loaded with parts borrowed from other films.

Judging Annapolis by its most appealing attributes (among all the cliches): It's not bad superficially, but neither is it all that it could be.

Pretty much every line in the movie comes from another movie -- 'How bad do you want it?' 'You're not good enough,' etc. And like virtually all Hollywood films about the military, Annapolis is cheerfully phony.

From the obviously fake shipyard to the repeated violations of what most of us recognize as the 'Code' of the Academy, to the absurd casting of people who couldn't physically hack the Academy's physical requirements, Annapolis fails.

The movie plays out with the same martial drumbeat inevitability of a parade march.

The stuff is digestible, I suppose, but few would argue that it goes down a treat. In fact, at the risk of insubordination, you could do worse than greet this navy chow with a crisp salute and a snappy, 'Sir, no, sir.'

Annapolis is less like a movie than a virus -- one that clings so tenaciously to its host genre that it begins to take on the characteristics of a real movie, even though it's just faking.

This isn't as much a movie as it is a recipe for a cinematic casserole in which the ingredients are cliches and rip-offs.

Although crudely effective in a strictly formulaic way, the film manages to strike nary an unfamiliar note.

Neither lagging military recruitment nor movie attendance is likely to be helped by Annapolis, a by-the-numbers underdog drama set at the storied U.S. Naval Academy in the Maryland port of the title.

This military drama never gets moving. Just mainly posturing by all sides concerned. The screenplay was definitely missing in action. Paul Chambers, CNN.