Metacritic reviews

The movie is also brisk and wholehearted and smarter than you expect.

A paint-by-numbers story that offers no surprises and a hero and villain etched in white and black with few shades of gray.

This flick has modest ambitions, but it delivers the goods in a fresh manner.

Originally, somebody may have wanted the film to be a serious exploration of the dark side of high school sports, but it ended up as just one more sports picture.

It is an ostensibly serious story about being young and struggling to wrest control over one's life from the hands of fools, yet it doesn't behave like a serious drama that wants to lead us anywhere.

We are aware going in that Varsity Blues' cannot be a landmark of world cinema. Yet working within the tired formula, the picture turns out to be not so bad.

A movie that doesn't buy into all the tenets of our national sports religion; the subtext is that winning isn't everything.

Eventually fizzles out badly.

An unappetizing mix of raucously vulgar comedy and teen-angst melodrama.

Half-comedy, half-coming-of-age movie with another half or so of sports film and maybe another quarter of soundtrack that adds up to 175 percent of a bad movie.