VARSITY BLUES cannot make up its mind what kind of movie it wants to be. At its core, it contains an honest examination of the pressures placed on high school athletes by their parents and coaches. Produced jointly by MTV Films and Paramount Pictures, the movie completely buries its dramatic side with a laughless and cliched teenage comedy.
In the one notable piece of acting in the film, a serious Jon Voight plays Coach Bud Kilmer. Coach Kilmer has coached his West Canaan, Texas AAA football team to 2 state championships and 22 district championships in his 35 years as head coach. Having played for another high school football team (Garland) when we won two AAAA state championships in a row, I can certainly identify with the pressures and rewards of living in a small, football-obsessed town.
Director Brian Robbins manages to get all of the small-town, football rituals right, although they may be somewhat dated. In the gym, the charged student body listens with enthusiasm as the coach and the star quarterback brag in advance about their upcoming victory over this week's rival team. On the practice field, the coach grabs the players' facemasks and screams obscenities at them when they don't do precisely what he demands. The director gets the quieter moments right as well. Before the game, the team bows their heads in a sincere rendition of the Lord's Prayer.
"Football is a way of life," the second-string quarterback, John "Mox" Moxon, explains in the film's narration to the viewers, who may not realize that Texas high-school football for many is a cross between a religious cult and a dictatorship. "You never question the sanctity of the coaches," Mox adds later.
Savor the film's few serious moments, and perhaps they can sustain you through the lame comedy by writers John Gatins and W. Peter Iliff that so dominates the movie.
With a pretty boy smile but little depth, James Van Der Beek plays Mox. Mox is a bench warmer until the first-string quarterback, Lance Harbor (Paul Walker), is sacked and injured. This incident is caused by the coach's forcing a dangerously ill, offensive guard to play when he shouldn't. When the offensive guard passes out, the defensive guard crushes Lance. With its recurring theme about coaches abusing players, the movie asks some challenging questions, but it quickly reverts back to bad slapstick before the audience has a chance to ponder the issues.
VARSITY BLUES is the type of movie in which the height of comedy consists of casting a 400 pound actor, Ron Lester, to play the team's dumb guard, Billy Bob, and giving the guard a pet pig to ride next to him in his big pick-up.
A typically unbelievable series of incidents involves the school's sex education teacher. She's a bimbo who makes the students chant in unison the common names for sex organs. Later, in an all-night boozing session at a strip bar, the high school football players recognize their teacher, who is the most attractive stripper there. Not at all shocked, she goes to their table to drink with them.
The story's depictions of alcohol abuse have to be its low points. The parents and the kids seem to be regular, heavy drinkers. A drunken party, in which the team gets wasted, follows every game. One scene has Billy Bob puking in the washing machine as a couple has sex on the dryer next to it. When the cops show up at the party, no one is arrested. The cops just admonish the underage drinkers not to drink and drive, a warning they promptly ignore. Teens watching this movie will learn many lessons, and few of them will be good.
The movie has a subtheme of girls, especially cheerleaders, needing the boys as their only ticket out of town. And the accepted way shown is for them to use sex as an enticement to the boys. The extremely attractive Darcy (Ali Larter), for example, starts taking her clothes off for Mox, who is shocked, as soon as he becomes a starter. She was once Lance's girl, but an injured Lance doesn't have the earnings potential she feels she needs.
And finally in its attempt to cover all the stereotypes, the story gives the team a token African-American player named Brown, who is the star running back. The coach, who would probably run over his own mother to win a game, is such a racist that he tries to keep Brown from scoring touchdowns.
For all of its faults, the movie does come up with a nice twist in the obligatory big game finale. The twist, however, isn't worth waiting for, so if you feel the urge to walk out sooner, don't resist.
VARSITY BLUES runs 1:40. It is rated R for sex, nudity, profanity and alcohol abuse. The movie might be acceptable for older teenagers, but watch out for the messages they will be getting.
By : Steve Rhodes
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 0
If this year's films about life in high school are all going to be like "Jawbreaker" and "Varsity Blues," we're in for trouble. These are not bad or unwatchable movies, simply mediocrities. "Jawbreaker," about the kidnapping of a beautiful, sweet high-school girl who accidentally dies of asphyxiation, is meant to be a of the satiric, horror-comedy genre, but satirizes nothing, is unfunny and has not a slasher in sight. "Varsity Blues," which has a mishmash of floundering themes, hasn't an original bone in its rib-crushing body. What's more even "Waterboy" is more believable. Would you believe, for example, that a high-school teacher in a small Texas town would moonlight as a stripper in a nearby bar-- where, even if everyone under 21 were denied entrance, surely the parents of the kids she teaches could be her audience? And can you accept the fact that a razzle-dazzle, tough-as-nails guy whose statue overlooks the football field can coach a small-town high-school team to twenty-two annual division championships without being picked up by a big-name college? How about going with two separate scenes involving the a trainer's illegal injecting of a pain- killing substance into the knees of two seriously injured athletes while leaving the door ajar? (The massive rebellion that climaxes the film could not have taken place had coach Bud Kilmer simply turned the lock.)
The major flaw of "Varsity Blues" is its lack of singularity. Like dozens of similar movies about young jocks and their adoring women, Brian Robbins' saga, utilizing a script by John Gatins and W. Peter Iliff, takes us inside a high school West Canaan, Texas, where the town's entertainment is drinking, girls and football. Lance Harbor, the star quarterback (played by the Brad Pitt-like Paul Walker) enjoys the reverence of the citizenry, but his fame lasts only until he is sidelined for good with a bruising knee injury. His place is taken by second-stringer John Moxon (played by the charismatic James Van Der Beek of the TV show "Dawson's Creek"), a scholarly, squeaky-clean fellow who has whiled away his bench time reading Kurt Vonnegut. The town's reverence transfers to him instantly, including the allegiance of Lance's girl friend Darcy (Ali Larter) while he incurs the denunciation of his own sweetie-pie, Julie (Amy Smart). As Moxon smarts increasingly from the demands of dictatorial, hell-raising, victory-obsessed Coach Bud Kilmer (Jon Voight), he leads his team to a new realization of their exploitation while gaining further insight into his very soul.
"Varsity Blues" features some excellent slow-motion shots of the fellows in action on the field, scenes which would persuade any responsible adult to forbid his kid from competitively playing The Great American Sport. Athletes propel themselves against one another with the ferocity of a missile launched against Baghdad while the fans sit safely in the stands admiring the mini-skirted cheerleaders and boosting the transcendent home team. Jon Voight turns in his usual performance as town villain, the sort of role that propelled films like "Enemy of the State," "The Rainmaker" and "Anaconda" to box office success in recent years. It's simply difficult to accept he's mentoring a mere team of 17- and 18-year-olds, the way he curses and pummels them when they are behind and especially when their hero, Moxon, alters his instructions to set up plays of his own choosing. Kilmer brings to mind Nick Nolte's Colonel Tall of Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line," with his utter disregard of the well-being of the troops and his feeling that victory is everything. The boys look more like college seniors or even pro players than pimply adolescents, but perhaps that's the way the macho Lone Star State turns 'em out.
