Sometimes bad movies are successful and good movies are not. The same is true for music albums.

“Annie” is a 2014 film adaptation of a broadway musical, not to be confused with the 1982 version by the same name. As a musical, the “Annie” soundtrack is featured heavily in the movie, and the album sold very well in the United States.

It is not unusual for the soundtrack of a good movie to achieve individual success, but “Annie” was not a good movie.

“Annie” currently holds a 27% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 33% rating on Metacritic. Clearly the film was not received very positively. However, this did not seem to affect the album’s sales.

A musical lives and dies based on the quality of it’s songs, and this soundtrack certainly could have contributed to the movie’s poor reviews.

This soundtrack is very poorly made with awkward lyrics and underwhelming vocal performances from Jaime Fox and Quvenzhané Wallis. This may be due to the fact that many of the songs on this album are sung by people who are actors first and vocalists second.

Some songs made for movies can work well even without visual accompaniment. “Annie” contains no such songs. Almost all of the music on this album features a character from the film singing about their current situation, causing the lyrics to make little sense out of context.

The songs also have no common theme or style to connect them. Each song has a completely different topic and tone, making them feel disjointed as if they do not belong together.

None of this album’s content needs to be sung either; the songs don’t explore complex themes or emotions. They just state facts that could just as easily have been conveyed through dialogue.

I do not know why “Annie” achieved any success. It fails both as a movie soundtrack and a stand-alone album.

This album has no redeeming qualities. Even if you liked the movie, I would still recommend that you do not buy it.”

1 / 5 stars