Here’s something I’ll bet that you didn’t know but that Justin
Lin’s Annapolis will tell you. The point of attending the
United States Naval Academy — at least if you are a blue collar
kid from the wrong side of the river (not the Severn but the
Delaware, by the way) and employed in the local ship-building
industry — is to find yourself a pretty midshipwoman, get her to
teach you all she knows about boxing, and then climb into the ring
with the Academy’s heavyweight champ so as to win you a place in
the elite company of midshipmen. Oh, and by the way, you may from
time to time have to put up with some sort of educational activity
in the intervals between boxing matches.
Welcome, once again, to Hollywood’s bizarro world. Just think of
all it has taught us that we wouldn’t otherwise know — for
example, that the Vietnam War made the impact that it did on
American POWs because they were forced to play Russian roulette
with their captors or that Pearl Harbor, nasty as it was for the
American armed forces, at least had the virtue of sparing Kate
Beckinsale the embarrassment of having two boyfriends at once. More
recently, we have learned from the movies that the English
settlement of North America was chiefly notable because it
coincided with Captain John Smith’s mid-life crisis and that the
man charged with avenging the terrorist atrocity at Munich in 1972
retired from the Israeli secret service to take up moralizing.
It’s all a matter of proportion, isn’t it? And the fact that
Hollywood so regularly gets the proportions wrong tells you
something about the culture that I hope I am not alone in finding
disturbing. Back in the 1980s, the advertising folks in charge of
Army recruiting came up with the supremely silly slogan, perhaps
pitched at the teenage audience for superhero comic books, “An Army
of One.” I can’t remember whether it preceded or followed the
almost equally silly one inviting would-be soldiers to “Be All You
Can Be.” They still use both, I believe, which must mean that there
is a certain potency, a certain resonance to the idea of
reconciling the philosophical individualism of the American
teenager with traditional ideas of military honor.
There is also probably some resonance to the ideas of perpetual
motion, thinking and growing rich and squaring the circle.
In theory, the former ship-builder and amateur boxer Jake Huard
(James Franco) goes to the Naval Academy to serve his country, but
as that ambition appears to have zero cinematical interest, Mr. Lin
and his screenwriter, David Collard, don’t bother to show him
serving his country but only boxing, and displaying his
determination to be all he can be as a boxer. Perhaps because most
of us have seen a boxing movie before — and because there is a
certain sameness to boxing movies — the usual formula is varied by
the elimination of the crusty old trainer and his replacement by
the pretty and shyly devoted girlfriend (Jordana Brewster). After
all, Annapolis and the Navy itself have already been co-ed for a
generation.
Anyway, Mr. Franco is just as pretty. Fresh from his soulful
Tristan, he is here a soulful Jake who is suffering from the
deprived, working-class background in which he grew up. He tells us
that he has been told all his life — and his hypercritical dad
(Brian Goodman) is there to prove it — that he’s not good enough.
Piffle! Does Hollywood think we can’t recognize a golden boy when
we see one? Here’s a guy who can’t even begin to persuade us that
he hasn’t been told all his life just the opposite. But remember,
it’s Hollywood bizarro world, where Naval Academy plebes say things
like: “I know we’re four guys in a shower, but can we keep the
testosterone to a minimum?”
It should be obvious by now that any resemblance to an actual
institution in Maryland is purely coincidental.
