REVIEW:
Varsity Blues is a solid high-school movie. In fact, it’s a different sort of high-school movie. This one is about a sports team and the players, parents, girlfriends, and coach. In that sense, one might say it’s a football movie more than anything else, kind of like Remember the Titans. Only that’s not really true either. You see that movie was really about the sport, talking about things like strategy and teamwork. Varsity Blues is more about the show of it all. It doesn’t try to be anything that it’s not, but at the same time, it doesn’t try to get very deep about anything either. The movie exists very much as a sort of B movie, all about the fun, while barely being at all about the smarts.
Let’s start with this… the movie is about the town. West Canon, Texas. From the very opening montage and voice over narration, we are hearing all about the town and how in this town football is life. Specifically the high school football team. We get a number of town scenes sprinkled in throughout the movie, like a barbecue where the two quarterbacks have a standoff throwing contest, egged on by their fathers, involving hitting a can of the father’s heads with the ball.
The main storyline here is a take on All About Eve or Showgirls, or any movie to use the idea of the big shot star getting injured and our protagonist being called up to the plate, to be the replacement. There are many stories about rises to success, from Goodfellas to Boogie Nights. Only those stories aren’t about someone getting replaced in order for there to be an opening. Varsity Blues is. Jonathan Moxon, (played by James Van Der Beek in his most high profile and best movie,) is our protagonist.
The movie puts Moxon in constant conflict with the coach, Kilmer, played by Jon Voight. The problem is that Kilmer doesn’t have very much development in any way. He’s a two-dimensional villain who cares only about winning. In fact, just two years before this movie, Voight appeared as the villain in Anaconda, where he was playing a snake poacher, and he probably had more character development in that film, despite it being a cheap thrills monster movie. Voight is certainly menacing and slimy whenever he plays a bad guy, but that doesn’t change the fact that his character is very unrealistic and not developed at all. For example, a key plot point involves him giving steroids to players, but it’s not really hidden from the other players or kept secretive, and with something that scandalous, it certainly would have been. Another issue comes at the end of the movie with Kilmer’s fate, and that fact that there isn’t another single adult in the locker room anywhere to be found. Kilmer ends up taking orders from the players and changing his career trajectory based in what these kids are saying to him, as if they are his bosses. A smarter movie would have introduced us to the athletic director, the principal of the school, and other adult authority characters. Take the Hugh Jackman movie Bad Education, for example, which not only featured the super intendant and assistant super intendant, but also parents who were on the school board, helping to make the important decisions.
As a fun, campy football movie, Varsity Blues does work. It’s almost like an action movie set in the world of sports. The stunts that we see on the field are terrific. They are all done in slow motion and set to pop music, and that’s part of the fun. Whether it’s the ACDC song “Thunderstruck“ or There Goes My Hero,” by the Foo Fighters, this movie definitely pairs the music with the football scenes and slow motion choreography nicely. And it has a clear villain, which is something that most sports movies don’t. It’s just another reason why this is almost more like an action movie than a sports movie. The problem is that this villain might be the most interesting character, and yet we never learn enough about him or what happens to him. Oh well. There’s definitely a lot of ways this movie could have been better, but for what they do give us, it’s surprisingly a fun time.