Web posted on:
Monday, January 18, 1999 2:19:46 PM EST

From Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- Having grown up in a small town in Alabama, I think I can safely say that I know a thing or two about obsessive high school football mentality.

My theory has always been that people in the South, riled up as some of them apparently still are for having lost the Civil War, arrange for their kids to get down and win a battle every Friday night while Mom and Dad sit in the stands, their heads and hearts swelling until they're about to burst. (Those marching bands aren't playing "Dixie" after every touchdown because it's a catchy melody, you know.)

Theatrical preview for "Varsity Blues" Windows Media: 28k or 56k Real: 28k or 56k Clip: "Stealing the car" Video clip: 2Mb QuickTime

You might be chuckling about that, but anybody who's ever been around this kind of mindset knows that it's not as farfetched as it sounds. The near-religious emphasis put on the old punt, pass, and kick also enables people who are improperly pigeonholed as dumb farmers to climb a social ladder of their own devising. If you can't be Elvis, you might as well be a quarterback. And, if you can't be a quarterback, well, you might as well be a dumb farmer.

Brian Robbins' "Varsity Blues" is set in arguably the most football-crazed part of this country: Texas, home of the Alamo, crushed Armadillos, and the Cowboys (Dallas variety). The small-town setting is captured to perfection; every available space is painted up in school colors, and beer-bellied former players aren't satisfied with merely attending games -- they also have to watch the practices.

But Robbins (and MTV films, a company that's now scored a teen-age pandering trifecta with "Joe's Apartment," "Dead Man on Campus," and this thing) treats the people of this town as barely-coherent rubes. (Some of the accents are so country-fried they'd embarrass Jethro Bodine.)

The emotional complexity of why everyone's going nuts over a bunch of kids running around with an inflated piece of leather is never questioned for a second; it's just a fact. That's shallow enough, but the most offensive thing about the movie is how it repeatedly pretends to be a morality tale while spending most of its time marching out the sexy fillies and having the kids get drunk, drunker, and drunkest. This isn't a movie about the corruptible influence of high school football; it's a movie about how cool it is to get wasted, especially when all the girls in your town look like Shania Twain.

Teen heartthrob James Van Der Beek stars as John Moxon, the lowly backup quarterback for a team that's marching its way to yet another conference championship, courtesy of their star QB, Lance Harbor (Paul Walker) and their glory-hungry coach, Bud Kilmer (Jon Voight).

Voight is once again locked into crazed-authority-figure mode, and sports the Southern accent that he's apparently very pleased to have perfected. (He uses it in so many movies, it's a wonder he didn't ladle it on when he played an Irish policeman in "The General.")

There's also the usual collection of hootin' and hollerin' teammates who practically own the town and drive around in a pickup truck with the humorously fat player's pet pig sitting on the seat next to them.

The story is exactly what you think it'll be once you understand how big a star Harbor is, and just how much Coach Kilmer despises that Moxon boy. (He catches him reading "Slaughterhouse Five" on the sidelines instead of studying his playbook. At least the kid's got good taste.)

Harbor goes down, of course, with a career-ending knee injury, and Moxon comes in off the bench, scrambling like Fran Tarkenton and passing like an adolescent Johnny Unitas. It's a minor complaint when stacked up against the industrial-strength foolishness of the rest of the movie, but how could this kid be openly ridiculed and forced to sit on the bench all season long when he's capable of scrambling away from an entire team of defenders and laying the ball over his receivers' shoulders 45 yards downfield?

Moxon starts to believe his own press after a while, turning his back on his sweet little girlfriend soon after he's given free beer by a local merchant, is besieged with admirers at the burger joint, and Playmate-material Texas girls strip off right there in front of him and rub whipped cream all over their erogenous zones.

For every two minutes of moralizing that screenwriters John Gatins and W. Peter Iliff squeeze into their script, you get 20 minutes of booze-fueled hootchy-cootchy. The amount of drinking is astonishing -- teen-age binges are portrayed as somewhat negative behavior, but nothing more than that, especially if you win your game the next day.

In fact, the only time the boozing is portrayed in a truly negative light is when a loss occurs because of it. The scene during which the demon alcohol is imbibed almost defies description. Early in the movie, we see the guys in a sex education class that's being taught by a prim, overly drawling teacher. The minute you lay eyes on her, you can tell that she's actually a hot number under all that stuffy clothing, and you have to figure she's going to let her hair down and take off her granny glasses at some point. Well, she does take them off, along with everything else.

Van Der Beek and his teammates head out to a strip club the night before a supposedly easy-to-win game, and who do you think comes prancing out to the strains of Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher?" No, it's not Jenny McCarthy -- it's their sex education teacher! And she's a babe! After her dance, she sits down and has a shot of whiskey with her students while they make lecherous comments. Despite living in a small, no-secrets town, this woman has somehow managed to pull off a double life that would make Marv Albert proud. How'd she do that?!

The fact of the matter is, nobody in the audience is supposed to care how she did it, because, hey, she's stacked! Understand, I'm as happy to ogle Playmate-material Texas girls as the next (heterosexual) guy, maybe even happier, but this thing is supposed to be teaching kids a lesson.

And it does, I suppose. The lesson is that you can make a ton of money in this country by appealing to the baser instincts of lecherous teen-agers. If you consider the need for unearned adulation to be one of mankind's baser instincts, the good folks at MTV are doing the very thing that's supposed to be making Voight's character so evil. "Using Kids for Fun and Profit" is a far more accurate title for the movie.

Someone should throw a flag.

I can't overstate how much drinking and sex goes on in "Varsity Blues." There's bad language, nudity, both male and female, and a cavalier attitude towards getting so blasted you have to puke into a nearby washing machine. I'm just wondering where they get these teachers. Rated R. 106 minutes.