Varsity Blues (1999)
Average Rating: 5/10
Reviews Counted: 52
Fresh: 21 | Rotten: 31
This is a predictable football movie that lacks intensity.
Average Rating: 5/10
Critic Reviews: 13
Fresh: 5 | Rotten: 8
This is a predictable football movie that lacks intensity.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.2/5
User Ratings: 114,746
My Rating
Movie Info
In his first feature following the success of television's Dawson's Creek, James Van Der Beek stars as Jonathan Moxon, the back-up quarterback on his high-school football team, the West Canaan Coyotes. In West Canaan, the only thing that matters is football, and the man who matters is the one with 22 divisional championships, coach Bud Kilmer (Jon Voight). Mox, as the young "A" student is called, is wrapping up his senior year on his way to Brown University in the shadow of his childhood friend,
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Cast
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James Van Der Beek
Jonathan "Mox" Moxon -
Jon Voight
Coach Bud Kilmer -
Paul Walker
Lance Harbor -
Ron Lester
Billy Bob -
Scott Caan
Tweeter -
Richard Lineback
Joe Harbor -
Tiffany C. Love
Collette Harbor -
Amy Smart
Julie Harbor -
Eliel Swinton
Wendell -
Thomas F. Duffy
Sam Moxon -
Jill Parker-Jones
Mo Moxon -
Joe Pichler
Kyle Moxon -
Ali Larter
Darcy -
Tonie Perensky
Miss Davis -
Jesse Plemons
Tommy Harbor
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All Critics (72) | Top Critics (18) | Fresh (21) | Rotten (32) | DVD (10)
Slickly enjoyable!
Top CriticVarsity Blues eventually fizzles out badly!
The football scenes are involving, the acting is up to snuff, and there is something about those last days of high school that remains a solid background for even the most familiar of stories.
Scenes work, but they don't pile up and build momentum.
...tries hard to be honest and sensitive but often as not comes across as heavy-handed. (Blu-ray Edition)
...slick, well made, and well acted, but it takes no chances. Seems a wasted opportunity.
...someone could make a very interesting, nuanced film about the exalted place that high school football holds in some parts of Texas... this isn't that film.
Van Der Beek and Voight weigh in with convincing performances .
A serviceable 1990s teen flick.
Audience Reviews for Varsity Blues
Super Reviewer
My favorite sports film of all time is 61*, and that's not just because I'm a die-hard Yankees fan. I think my favorite moment in Billy Crystal's film is Roger Maris's response to one of the reporter's questions: the reporter asks him about the heroism of what he accomplished (I wish I could quote verbatim, but I don't have that good a memory), and Maris replies, "I don't think that's something you can earn on a ball field." And because of the attention that film pays to Maris's off-the-field struggles, we understand his point. Essentially, Varsity Blues flirts with the same point. The main character, Mox, considers his goals reaching beyond high school, and the film attempts to satirize/criticize the seriousness with which Texas high school communities take football. The problem is that the film ends up reinforcing everything it criticizes. Everything that you think would happen does, and what we're left with is a crippling contradiction: the goals these people hold so dearly are foolishly short-sighted, but we're still supposed to relish in the moments the characters achieve them.
Also, perhaps it's because my high school experience was much like most people's time in prison, but I always find films that portray high schoolers as adults, with the freedoms and problems adults have, to be extraordinarily false. After all, I don't know any town, in Texas or anywhere else, where seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds would be able to drink freely, steal a police car, go to a strip club (where their teacher moonlights [a teacher's pay isn't that bad]), and still face no consequences.
Overall, if you like over-drawn cliches and don't mind if a film is thematically contradictory, then enjoy Varsity Blues and the brief but delectable shot of Ali Larter in a whip cream bikini.
Super Reviewer
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- Coach Bud Kilmer: Make him understand.
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- Miss Davis: Penis, Penis, Penis. Vagina, Vagina, Vagina.
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- Sam Moxon: You get the opportunity of a lifetime, and you treat it like a joke...
- Mo Moxon: Playing football may have been the opportunity of your lifetime, but I don't want your life!
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"Make your own rules."
I had seen this movie over the course of the last five years, but never as a whole. I had always seen parts of it here and there on television, but before I had watched it as a whole, I had only known the movie in clips. It's a fairly standard high school film. It's overly melodramatic and each and every character or plot development is completely overplayed to the point where the cliches are flying at you from the screen. Varsity Blues feels so amateurish, it's ridiculous. It's poorly acted, written, and directed; settling for just the standard plot and characters that go along with lazy, unoriginal high school movies.
In Texas, football is everything. Kids are taught from a young age to give all they have to the game, even if they don't really want to. Mox is the backup quarterback to an all-state god. When the starter is injured and can't play anymore, Mox is forced to step into the starters shoes and take over the team. His coach, Bud Kilmer is a local god, but only the players really know what he is like. He doesn't actually care about his players, only his résumé.
I really dislike this movie, despite its easy to watch nature. The only reason it's so easy to watch, comes from the fact that there is a certain amount of enjoyment in watching a film that is so unsubtle and poorly executed. There isn't really a level that the movie actually succeeds on. It's all just incredibly horrible.
This isn't a movie of the caliber of Friday Night Lights. All it is, is another stereotypical, cliche, and insultingly stupid take on high school football and the players who play. Could the movie have been worse? Probably, but not much worse. I would suggest skipping this one. No matter how much you like high school movies or how much you like sports movies or any combination of the two; Varsity Blues is absolutely not worth your time.