Rating: 

The Info

Directed by: Brian Robbins
Written by: W. Peter Iliff
Starring: James Van Der Beek, Jon Voight, Paul Walker, Ron Lester, Scott Caan
Produced by: Herb Gains, Tova Laiter, Brian Robbins, Michael Tollin

The Nutshell

A second-string quarterback for a high school football team has to choose between his dreams of going to college and being a hometown football star when the first string quarterback is badly injured.

The Review

    There seems to be two main types of sports movies: those that don't take themselves seriously at all (Major League, Necessary Roughness), and those that take themselves slightly seriously (Tin Cup, Bull Durham). Varsity Blues somehow seems to fit both groups: while it does take itself slightly seriously for parts of the movie, it has the feel of one that doesn't.

    James Van Der Beek is the star of the film as Johnathan Moxon, or Mox to his friends. Mox is the backup QB on a football team that has no need of one, since it has one of the state's best QBs already playing for it. The star QB, Lance Harbor (Walker) is the darling of the entire town of West Canaan. Every girl would sleep with him and no store would ever charge him for anything. When he gets inevitably injured, his shoes are filled eagerly by Mox.

    As Mox, Van Der Beek gives us a typical character we have all seen before: the good guy. He doesn't do drugs, he won't take steroids and he studies hard for school. In short, Mox is out of place in West Canaan. Van Der Beek plays him with lots of energy, shedding his cleancut image on Dawson's Creek with gusto. As a foil to Mox is the team's coach, Bud Kilmer, played with relish by Jon Voight. As Kilmer, Voight is over-the-top, turning Bud into a tyrant. He rants, screams, slaps around, and completely mentally owns his team and the town. He is a veritable god to the people of West Canaan and he knows it. While Voight takes obvious glee in playing this badass coach, he just barely manages to not slide into idiocy. His Kilmer is believable to anyone who has ever gone through a competitive high school sports league of any kind in a small town built on it. The rest of the cast is rounded out by a typical group of likeable misfits, including Ron Lester as Billy Bob, and Scott Caan as Tweeder, and of course some love/sex interests in the form of Ali Larter as Darcy, and Tiffany Love as Collette..

    Varsity Blues does a great job of capturing small-town Mid-America, where sports can truly define a town. Not only is every male teenager on West Canaan on the football team or wanting to be, but every father in the town was once on the team, and it is as if they never left. The rivalries between teammates carry over to their fathers and vice versa, and the pressures from the players' fathers to excel and outperform the competition at any cost are very real. You just know while watching the film that unless something drastic is changed about the town, the current team members will become those same competitive fathers in a never-ending cycle. In this sense, Varsity Blues is a cut above most humorous sports films. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the film is lacking.

    The film resorts to several stereotypes that are familiar to us all. There's the fat guy, who is shown eating greasy foods and being disgusting, since naturally the fat guy can only there for the comic relief of having a fat guy eating a lot of food etc. There's the lead cheerleader who wants to sleep with Mox only after he becomes the head QB, since we all know that the head cheerleader is always the slutty one. The list goes on. Another minor problem with the film is one that plagues most sports movies: you know that that last pass into the endzone is going to work, that that crazy play they have wanted to try since the start of the film will work perfectly, that the good guy will end up with the good girl. There is little to no suspense in the plot, and this might take away from the film's climax for some.

    Lots of things work for Blues, but not everything. While this is a worthy addition to the college sports movie pantheon, it will never earn an Academy Award. Though really, a film like this isn't made for awards... it's made to entertain people who love sports films, and this it does well.

Copyright - Tim Chandler

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