DIRECTOR: Peter Farrelly
CAST: Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, Bill Murray, Jake Picking, Will Ropp, Archie Renaux, Kyle Allen, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, Matt Cook, Omari K. Chancellor, Will Hochman, Goya Robles, Kevin K. Tran
RUNNING TIME: 126 mins
CERTIFICATE: 15
BASICALLY…: In 1967, a young man (Efron) travels to Vietnam to deliver beer to his enlisted friends…
NOW FOR THE REVIEW…
It’s fair to say that people were pretty miffed when director Peter Farrelly’s Green Book won the Oscar for Best Picture over the likes of Roma, A Star Is Born and BlacKkKlansman. However, while it certainly wasn’t as profound or even as intelligent as some of those other nominees, the film did have its heart in enough of a right place to pass as a decent, if hardly Oscar-worthy, crowd-pleaser. It’s a trait that Farrelly clearly wants to continue with his follow-up feature The Greatest Beer Run Ever, which also attempts a simplistic but accessible take on a serious historical topic that still rings true to this day, but it is far less likely to win over Academy voters as much as his previous film, on account of it being even more standard and unremarkable than even Green Book.
Set in 1967, as the war in Vietnam rages on, New York-based Marine veteran John “Chickie” Donahue (Zac Efron) spends his days drinking and slacking with his buddies – at least, the ones who haven’t enlisted to fight in the war – when he isn’t working as a merchant seaman. Like most patriotic Americans at the time, he believes that the Vietnam conflict is a formidable show of force for the troops, and to show his appreciation Chickie decides to undertake a ludicrous mission: he will sail out to Vietnam, find his friends, and hand them some good old-fashioned American beer. Of course, upon arrival to the war-struck country, Chickie slowly discovers that the situation is far dire than he’s been led to believe, and as he travels across war zones to seek out his friends and deliver cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, he learns of the true devastating realities behind the Vietnam war.
Those realities are, if you’ve seen any other Vietnam war movie ever, very easy to come by, since The Greatest Beer Run Ever really doesn’t have anything new to say about the conflict nor its impact on American society. Before Efron’s hapless hero even sets sail across the ocean, you know exactly what lessons are going to be learned, because not only have similar ones been taught in movies about this war, but were also used (albeit under wildly different circumstances) in Farrelly’s Green Book; basically, the ones about not being such a single-minded individual and embracing other, more accurate points of view. However, for all its flaws, Green Book actually trod that familiar path better than this movie does, since there was a sterner focus on the characters and their blossoming friendship which really allowed the audience to understand them better as people; here, aside from Efron’s character, we barely spend enough time with these soldier friends of his to really get a feel for their friendship, let alone why this guy would travel halfway across the world into a deadly war zone just to bring them some beer. Farrelly instead chooses to indulge in the most obvious Vietnam-related debates and “discoveries” that you already know the answers to, and explores them in ways that are no different than any number of the other, far better movies on the topic, without the real kind of human impact that it seriously needs.
The film’s lack of originality, and its somewhat bland approach to the politics surrounding the Vietnam war, are its biggest crux, because if you take that out of the equation for a moment, then The Greatest Beer Run Ever does have some decent entertainment quality to it, even if it’s never exactly a great amount. Zac Efron easily carries the movie with a likeable lead turn that’s almost straight out of the kind of goofy comedy that Farrelly and brother Bobby were once notorious for making, except within a deadly serious historical context. Admittedly, that can create some tonal issues, particularly when it tries to go for some zany screwball antics right as people are getting shot at from every angle imaginable, but it isn’t tasteless in its intentions, as much like Green Book it does wear its heart on its sleeve and doesn’t intentionally set out to offend people by making light of a devastating conflict. The filmmaking itself isn’t anything particularly special – it’s certainly not badly shot, but it’s nothing that stands out either – but the writing is noble enough for you to get behind this character’s wild journey, even if it rarely gets you as invested as you perhaps ought to be.
Its mediocrity stands out far more than it did with Green Book, especially when tackling a tricky topic such as the controversial nature of the Vietnam war, but The Greatest Beer Run Ever does have some spark to it, and enough fizz to keep you mildly buzzed as it plods along from one familiar concept to another, led by a committed turn by Zac Efron who, when given the right material, can get a lot of mileage out of a larger-than-life character. Just don’t expect it to dominate the awards field as much as Farrelly’s divisive predecessor did.
SO, TO SUM UP…
The Greatest Beer Run Ever features some zany energy to it, mostly due to a committed lead turn by Zac Efron as well as the noble intentions of director and co-writer Peter Farrelly, but it’s not enough to completely save an unremarkably told Vietnam war movie that preaches all the familiar messages you’ve heard in other movies, with little of the real human impact.
