Toronto Star, by Geoff Pevere, Movie Critic
January 15, 1999
Voight makes Varsity run
At 60, a full 30 years since he appeared as the baby-faced stud in Midnight Cowboy, Jon Voight has metamorphosed into one of the most watchable character actors in American movies. Maybe it's because he never attained the leading man status of Cowboy co-star Dustin Hoffman, or maybe it's because those boyish features have hardened into such a pallid mask of ruthlessness, but Voight, like the late J.T. Walsh, has become the kind of actor who enlivens even the most deadening of movies.
Don't believe me? Just rent Anaconda.
Varsity Blues, in which Voight plays a high school football coach so hell-bent on victory he'll drug injured players to keep them in the tame, is hardly the most deadening of movies.
But it would be considerably less fun to watch without Voight around to give it the goose now and then.
The story of an undermotivated, Vonnegut-reading jock named Mox (Dawson's Creek's likeably low-key James Van Der Beek) thrust into small-town stardom when he is suddenly promoted to high school quarterback, Varsity Blues is a classically American story about classical Americana.
Like Hoosiers and Field of Dreams, it's about sport in the heartland. And like most American movies, it's about the triumph of the free spirit over the forces of oppressive conformity - in this case the smart kid versus the cranky coach.
Which is exactly where Voight comes in. As Bud Kilmer, coach of the New Canaan, Texas, Coyotes, he plays a man who's let his own sense of worth become hopelessly entangled with the sporting record of the several generations of high school kids he's kicked from one goalpost to the other.
That's why, when he senses failure, fear or (in Van Der Beek's case) insolence, Bud's blue eyes harden into slits so icy the whole room goes cold with his fury. Every time he fixes that gaze on some luckless and terrified teenager, you half expect the kid to melt into a puddle on the floor.
Alas, Varsity Blues is not Bud Kilmer's story, it's Mox's. And Mox's story only gets really interesting when Bud is around to inject a little fury into otherwise unremarkable coming-of-age-in-a-small-town proceedings.
While engaging enough when it sticks to probing the role played by high school sport in rural America, the movie quickly turns goofy whenever it goes off (as it too often does) in search of a cheap gag.
There's a scene involving a sex ed instructor-turned-striper that wouldn't be unwelcome in Porky's, and another featuring a "whipped cream bikini" which makes you wish you were at home reading Vonnegut.
Still, it could be worse. The football scenes are rendered with hyped-up, bone-crunching velocity and Van Der Beek has an effortless, Tom Hanks, Jr., kind of charm.
And, of course, there's Jon Voight. Just when you think Varsity Blues is about to drift entirely into the realm of sentimental cliché, he comes along to kick its scrawny butt back on to the field.