As surprising as it may seem, the recent James Van Der Beek vehicle Varisty Blues is not in fact a sports film. It features many characters colliding into one another in slow motion wearing football uniforms, and it builds up to a climactic victory scene involving a game of that aforementioned sport, but it is not a sports movie.

That's a real shame, if you ask me, because Blues has some of the pieces in place to put together a fantastic sports film, covering a well-known yet rarely explored area of the sports universe: the fiercely competitive world of high school football in Texas. Unfortunately, it obscures that greatness with teeny-bopper bullshit that at times plays out as little more than bad outtake scenes from Van Der Beek's television vehicle, Dawson's Creek, which is great if you're a fan of teeny-bopper bullshit, but harsh if you're a fan of good movies.

Van Der Beek stars as Jonathan "Mox" Moxon, reserve quarterback for the West Canaan Coyotes and all-around decent young man. Though the legendary Coyotes coach, Bud Kilmer (Jon Voight), usually berates him and bullies him, Mox is called into action when the team's star quarterback (Paul Walker) is laid out for the season due to a controversial leg injury. It seems that Coach Kilmer has been injecting his top player with dangerous toxins to keep a knee injury from ending his season, and when the massive Billy Bob (Ron Lester) passes out on the field due to an unchecked concussion (again the result of ruthless coaching from Kilmer), a rough hit tears just about every ligament in the QB's knee. Yeesh. Naturally, Mox steps up for the season's last five games with some innovative play-calling that opposes Kilmer's more conservative approach to football. The tense relations between coach and quarterback build to an intense head during the final game of the season, where the Coyotes can clinch Kilmer's twenty-third district championship. Van Der Beek actually goes toe-to-toe with Voight in an all-out acting duel...and loses, but puts forth enough of an effort to show promise. Naturally, the Coyotes win, and they do it with class and style, but did you expect any less?

There are some amazing football sequences and even a few nice character moments in Blues, as Mox and his teammates learn to cope with the incredible pressures placed on teenage boys whose shoulders carry the burden of an entire town's worth of victory dreams. Director Brian Robbins has assembled some impressive young talent to fill out the supporting cast, especially Lester as the massive offensive lineman Billy Bob and Walker as the gridiron star who finds his shoes filled by Mox after a crippling injury. Yet instead of constructing a great movie on this strong foundation of surprising talent and quality writing, the film is padded out with a flaccid love triangle between Mox, his longtime girlfriend Julie (Amy Smart), and the head cheerleader/ubermegaultrababe of the school, Darcy Sears (Ali Larter, the blonde bombshell who Joshua Jackson admired from afar earlier this season on Dawson's Creek).

It's true that without this filler, we'd never see Darcy in her "whipped cream bikini," certainly a sight worth any red-blooded teenager's eight bucks. But the pieces in the teenybopper portions and the pieces in the decent sports movie portions never gel together, so it's ultimately a bit of a schizophrenic mess. My theory is that W. Peter Iliff could have written a great sports film using pieces of this script, but either before it reached the studio or after the studio got its grubby paws on it, the teenybopper bits were added to draw teenyboppers into the theater. Yet with Van Der Beek in the leading role, the movie could have been two hours of naked butt hair and still drawn a solid box office, so the end result is even more disappointing. Teenyboppers get an amputated version of their favorite television melodramas, and regular movie fans are deprived what could have been a riveting--and maybe even controversial--examination of high-stakes high school sports. As usual where Hollywood is concerned, nobody really wins except the folks who get the paychecks.