"Varsity Blues" is not so much a fully developed film as it is a crazy quilt made up of dumb-jock jokes, adolescent sex fantasies, generation-gap drama and sometimes dazzling gridiron action, all of which screenwriter W. Peter Iliff tries desperately to stitch together. The loose ends show and the final product ultimately doesn't hang together, but "Varsity" is still a better picture than you might expect, given that it was produced by MTV Pictures (who created last year's debacle "Dead Man On Campus") and directed by Brian Robbins, the man who previously brought "Good Burger" to the screen. "Varsity" also marks a modestly auspicious screen debut for "Dawson's Creek" star James Van Der Beek, who does a thoroughly respectable job -- and manages to pull off a decent Southwestern accent -- as a second-string high school quarterback reluctantly shoved into the spotlight. The movie is set in a Texas hamlet called West Canaan where football is an all-consuming obsession; in one of the script's more novel touches, the adults in town seem even more caught up in the competition than the kids do. For example, even though he's one of the West Canaan Coyotes, Jonathan "Mox" Moxon (Van Der Beek) would rather read "Slaughterhouse Five" on the sidelines and prepare for an Ivy League education than fully throw himself into the game, a mind-set that baffles coach Bud Kilmer (Jon Voight, frighteningly true-to-life), a dictatorial type who will do literally anything to ensure his team has a chance at the state championship. In its strongest scenes "Varsity" addresses such issues as parents trying to live vicariously through their children and the misguided practice of patching up players with pain-killers and sending them back out on the field instead of to the emergency room. Iliff also puts across the sad but true notion that for some of these kids football (or, for young women, snagging a football player) is one of the few ways to escape spending your life in a dead-end town. The clash between the over-zealous Kilmer and his quietly rebellious new star is equally well-dramatized. But just when it looks like "Varsity" may turn into a sort of "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" for the pigskin crowd, Iliff feels compelled to throw in an excess of boozy teen free-for-alls, as well as a ridiculous, unfunny subplot involving a dowdy sex-ed teacher who moonlights as a stripper. These useless diversions seem to have less to do with enhancing the story than they do with making the film attractive to the party-hearty set, and credibility goes rapidly down the drain as convenience store clerks give Mox free six-packs and the team whoops it up in a topless bar where nobody bats an eye at the sight of a bunch of 17-year-olds downing shots. Luckily, the movie regains its footing in time for a finale that features some genuinely exciting plays and a fairly novel twist on the hackneyed "big game" set-up. "Varsity Blues" fumbles too often to qualify as a particularly good film, but in its better moments it does have something valuable to say about its subject. James Sanford
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