Game Plan of ‘Varsity Blues’: Football, Drinking and Sex

Call it the Extraterrestrial Movie. You know, the kind in which an entire region of the country is trashed, the flaws of its characters are pretty much blamed on geography and the hero seems never to have met anyone else in the movie, much less grown up among them.

“Varsity Blues,” a trashy little movie about drinking, football and drinking, is also one of those films that pretends to moralize about the very behavior it milks for every giggle it can get. “In America we have laws,” says second-string quarterback Jonathan “Mox” Moxon (James Van Der Beek of TV’s “Dawson’s Creek”). “In West Canaan, Texas, there’s a society that has its own laws.”

Yup. And that society is bounded by the rules and scoreboard of high school football, a pangenerational obsession that leads fathers to act like idiots, young women to throw themselves at the nearest quarterback and the audience to believe that there’s very little else to do down there in the Lone Star State.

People’s entire lives are dictated by whether they were starting quarterback or sat on the bench, which is pathetic, but apparently true. At the same time, the attitude of the film--in which the West Canaan Coyotes eventually rebel against tyrannical coach Bud Kilmer (Jon Voight)--kind of makes you wonder: If Texans are really so rabid about their high school football, how are they going to see this movie? As a documentary?

Likewise, the take on high school sociology (almost everyone in the movie seems destined for AA meetings or the morgue) may not be far from the mark, but the movie’s blithe acceptance of aberrant behavior makes you wonder if the watchdogs of decency aren’t right.

Among the things the movie frowns on are Coach Kilmer’s freewheeling way with painkillers, and the way foxy Darcy (Ali Larter) gives herself a whipped-cream bikini to seduce Mox, once her old boyfriend Lance (Paul Walker) gets his knee, and his future, totaled. Mox, who’s waiting to hear from Brown University (a full academic scholarship is on the line, just in case you thought the movie was harboring any actual reverence for athletics), is above sleeping with his best friend’s girl, or cheating on his true love Julie (Amy Smart). But then again, Mox, his Texas drawl ebbing and flowing, seems to be from a planet other than the one on which West Canaan is situated.

What the movie seems to accept happily are drunkenness, promiscuity and debauchery. And frankly, if it were actually successful and didn’t seem to be striving quite so desperately for gross-out laughs and adolescent titillation, we probably wouldn’t care. But the sociopathic deportment of the Coyotes isn’t treated as irresponsible, or as a result of a community’s misguided indulgence toward its football stars. It’s just there for laughs, so the more sophomoric element of its audience can say, “Isn’t that cool?”

Voight, who these days seems to be working like a madman (his performance in “The General” is his best in years), is thoroughly convincing as Coach Kilmer, a guy who has had things his own way so long he can’t quite fathom that a snotty little brat like Mox wouldn’t kiss his feet. Mox is right, of course, Kilmer is a fiend. But what we can’t quite fathom is why Mox isn’t like anyone else in the movie, devoted to football, adoring of Kilmer. It’s not in the script. It’s certainly not in Van Der Beek’s performance.

But heck: Beer, sex and football. It doesn’t get any better than that. Not in West Canaan, Texas, anyway.

* MPAA rating: R for strong language throughout, sexuality and nudity, and some substance abuse. Times guidelines: It’s gross and profane and aimed at older teenagers.

‘Varsity Blues’

James Van Der Beek: Mox

Jon Voight: Coach Kilmer

Paul Walker: Lance Harbor

Ron Lester: Billy Bob

Scott Caan: Tweeder

Paramount Pictures presents, in association with MTV Films, a Marquee Tollin/Robbins production, in association with Tova Laiter Productions. Directed by Brian Robbins. Produced by Tova Laiter, Mike Tollin, Brian Robbins. Written by W. Peter Iliff. Executive producers David Gale and Van Toffler. Music supervisors G. Marq Roswell, Gary Calamar. Music by Mark Isham. Director of photography Charles Choen. Production designer Jaymes Hinkle. Editor Ned Bastille. Costume designer Wendy Chuck. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

Playing in general release around Southern California.