“I don’t want your finger.”

Bleh!

The 1999 high school football film Varsity Blues has been showing up on cable fairly regularly lately and, seeing as how I’m currently in the process of reviewing 80 of the best, worst,  most memorable, and most forgettable high school films of all time, I decided that I might as well watch the whole thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I had seen bits and pieces of it over the years.  I knew that it was set in Texas.  I knew Jon Voight played a fanatical football coach.  I knew that James Van Der Beek played an idealistic quarterback who clashed with the coach.  I knew that there was a fat guy named Billy Bob, mostly because every time an out-of-state director makes a film about Texas, there’s a fat guy named Billy Bob.  I knew about as much as one could learn from that episode of The Office where Michael Scott shows the film during “Movie Monday.”

“I don’t want your truck.”

But I had never seen the whole film so I decided, why not?  After all, I had already decided to review several other Texas-set high school films — The Last Picture Show, Dazed and Confused, Dancer, Texas, and Rushmore.  And hey those films were all good so maybe Varsity Blues would be good too!

Bleh.

One of the big clichés about Texas is that the entire state is obsessed with football.  (The other big cliché, of course, is saying that “everything is bigger in Texas.”  As if being a tiny state like Vermont is somehow preferable…)  I’ve always found the whole “Texas worships football” thing to be amusing because I’m a Texas girl and I don’t know a thing about football.  People tend to talk about Texas and football as if there aren’t any fanatical football fans in New York or California.  Ultimately, of course, it has little do with football and everything to do with the fact that the rest of the country loves to hate my home state.  If Vermont was known for being obsessed with football, there’d probably be thousands of articles about the “proud history of Vermont football.”  But since it’s Texas, we end up with movies like Varsity Blues.

“I don’t want your painfully obvious attempt at social commentary.”

Anyway, Varsity Blues tells the story of Mox (James Van Der Beek), who is a backup quarterback for the championship-winning West Caanan High School football team.  However, Mox isn’t just your average jock.  For one thing, he’s seen reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.  (It’s indicative of this film’s approach to characterization that we never learn whether Mox actually understands or even likes Slaughterhouse Five.  We’re just supposed to be impressed by the fact that he owns a copy of the book.)  Mox wants to leave Texas to go to an Ivy League school.  He doesn’t want to play under the legendarily abusive Coach Kilmer (Jon Voight).  (How evil is Kilmer?  So evil that he poses for pictures like the one above.)   And Mox resents the pressure put on him by his football-crazed father.  (“You throw that fucking pigskin!” his dad shouts at one point.)  As Mox puts it, “I don’t want your life!” and the line is just hilarious because Van Der Beek’s attempt to sound like a Texan is hilarious.

(Tip for actors: If you can’t do the accent, don’t try.  Because I guarantee, if I ever meet James Van Der Beek, I’m going to tell him that his accent sucked and then I’m going to laugh and laugh.  It probably won’t do much for his self-image.  Sorry, James.)

“Get me on Hawaii 5-0 because I don’t want James Van Der Beek’s career.”

Anyway, when star quarterback Lance (Paul Walker) is injured, Mox is suddenly the team’s starting quarterback.  And you know what?  Mox is going to play the game his way!  Soon, he is standing up the cartoonishly evil Coach Kilmer and challenging small town Texas’s obsession with high school football.

And here’s the thing: this is a film that wants to have it both ways.  It wants to challenge the philosophy of winning at all costs and it also pretends to be about the unfair pressure that high school athletes are put under.  But you better believe that the film ends with Mox leading his team to victory.  And it’s not so much that Mox wins as much as it’s the fact that you know the film would never have the courage to actually have Mox lose.  The film wants to be celebration of rebellion but, ultimately, it’s just a standard sports film.

And, even beyond that, it’s just not a very good film.  I was shocked, when I checked with the imdb, to discover that Varsity Blues was actually filmed in Texas because the film feels like it was made in California.  It has no authentic Texas flavor to it.  What it does have is some of the worst fake accents that I’ve ever heard in my life.

Mox may not want his father’s life but I don’t want this stupid film.

“Well, we don’t want your review!”