'Varsity Blues' is a fantastic movie! It really gets you thinking about who is really the protagonist and who is really the antagonist. Sad ending though...really installs sadness for the coach at the end as well as the realisation that he is not the bad guy.

2/1/14. For someone doesn't watch sports of any kind I always end up watching all the movies about sports. And, if they are done well, I end up loving them to death, like this one. What an excellent look at the American Religion of Sports! It really shows how disillusioned men stuck in their own lives live through the successes and failures of their sons, especially on the playing field. Such men are worse than stage mothers. Maybe they should have a term like "Sports Fathers." You know what I mean. Voight was excellent as the ultimate bullying coach, and Van Der Beek as the high school senior who is a decent guy who is wise beyond his years. Do catch this one in which Paul Walker was the cute quarterback who has it all until he gets injured. I loved this movie!

Varsity Blues is about as predictable a movie as you will ever see. It's a movie about high school football which is pretty much like every other movie about high school football. Every cliché of the genre is here. The overbearing coach. The football-obsessed town. The parents living vicariously through their children. The players who see football as their only means of escape. The intellectual player who realizes there's more to life than football. The cheerleader who just wants to be with the star, whoever the star may be at a given moment. The big, fat guy who's there for comic relief. The injury that changes everything. The big game at the end. Did I miss any? Oh yes, of course, the biggest cliché of all...Texas. Where else would you set a movie about a town where high school football is the only thing that matters?So you know what you're in for with this movie. Nothing is going to surprise you here. But as predictable and formulaic as it is Varsity Blues still provides reasonably decent entertainment. The characters may all be clichéd but a number of them still manage to be compelling. James Van Der Beek is the star of the movie, if not the football team. He plays the intellectual backup quarterback, Mox, a guy who plays football not because he wants to but because it is what he is expected to do. Mox's situation changes, how Mox responds to that change is the crux of the movie's rather simple story. Van Der Beek's performance is by no means extraordinary but for this movie it works perfectly fine. He creates a character we can relate to and root for. And Jon Voight, playing the thoroughly detestable Coach Bud Kilmer, does an excellent job creating a character we can despise and root against. Kilmer is a hard-driving jerk, a man who cares only about winning football games. He cares not how many young bodies he must destroy to win another district championship. The conflict between Mox, who gets what life is really about, and Kilmer, who most certainly does not, is quite dramatic. And if a high school football movie can give you some good drama that's really all you can ask. There is nothing spectacular about Varsity Blues. There is nothing that really sets it apart from all the other movies of its type you have already seen. But it is at least entertaining enough to be worth your while. There are good dramatic moments, a few good laughs, some compelling characters. And some rather inventively used whipped cream. It may not rise above its genre but for what it is, and all it was ever meant to be, Varsity Blues is a success.

I'm really glad that "Friday Night Lights" was released in 2004. It didn't make quite as big a splash as "Varsity Blues", but it was a much better movie in terms of quality, and it had far more realistic characters and settings. Being a former high school football player, I get very picky when it comes to high school sports movies, especially about football. "Varsity Blues" had some good qualities, but was an overall miss for me.The biggest problem with "Varsity Blues" was that to me it was less of a sports movie and more of a frat house comedy knock-off with cheesy dramatic elements thrown in for desperate attempts at artistic credibility. As much as I like Jon Voight, I really didn't buy him as the coach. He was just too over-the-top; too unnecessarily evil to the point where he was a cliché. Sure he's concerned with winning. I mean, what good coach isn't? But did he have to be a steroid-injecting racist too? I also didn't buy the fact that he seemed to be the only coach on the team. For a team that big, you would think there would be some assistant coaches.James Van Der Beek is an actor I also usually like. He does play a likable guy in this movie, and often times plays his naivety very well. However, he completely lost it for me during that stupid attempt at an Oscar nomination ("I don't want your life!"). Plus, the part in the movie where he takes his teammates out to a strip club the night before a big game was never explained. He was supposed to play a smart kid! Smart kids don't do that! In relation to that, there were so many things wrong with that strip club segment of the movie. For one, they lost the game that came next (despite the opposing team appearing to be super human and making some hits that pale in comparison to most NFL teams), yet still made it to the State Championships in the end? That doesn't happen. Also, no one seemed to have a problem with the beginning part where the football player who got drunk, naked, and stole a police car with four other nude women in it. Yeah, it's funny, but if that happened in reality, the football player would have been convicted on five felony accounts. That would have been AFTER he was kicked off the team too.If the producers wanted to make a good high school football movie, they could have. Instead, they made a cheap flick which appealed to the MTV Generation with football players who were too perfect, and scenarios that would be almost guaranteed to never happen in real life. "Friday Night Lights" was to me a much better high school football movie, and not necessarily about beautiful people with problems. "Varsity Blues" is just a fluke.