Mark Reviews Movies: THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER

The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Apple TV+

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 29, 2022

The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a pretty amusing comedy about a plan so dumb that it feels inherently absurd but so well-meaning that we also want the guy who concocted it to pull off his mission. This is based on a true story, which seems both right, simply because it is so foolish, and nearly impossible, since it's difficult to imagine someone risking life and limb and sanity in a warzone just to offer up a nice gesture. The movie comes from co-writer/director Peter Farrelly, that long-time maker of outlandish comedies, of which this definitely fits that category, and more recent adherent to sincere but slightly amusing drama, which this one eventually becomes. It's a better comedy.

As for the real-life story, that belongs to John "Chickie" Donohue, a resident of the Inwood neighborhood of New York City who watched his neighbors and lifelong friends join the military during the Vietnam War and ship off to a place they didn't know—into a conflict of which they had little knowledge (Somehow, the movie avoids any discussion or even acknowledgment of the draft, which is a confounding choice, to be sure). Donohue, a veteran of the Marines, was a merchant mariner in 1967, when he decided to find a shipment heading to Vietnam, join the crew, and bring along a lot of American beer to share with the neighborhood guys who were still serving over there.

Again, it was a pretty stupid, somewhat meaningless in the bigger picture of the war, incredibly dangerous, and rather thoughtful plan. In dramatizing Donohue's story, Farrelly's movie, co-written with Brian Hayes Currie and Pete Jones, is funny because it's not afraid to make that first part perfectly clear. Once the filmmakers try to frame this story within the context of just about everything else about the Vietnam War, they run into some serious problems of tone and trying to bite off way more than they're capable of chewing.

Chickie, as the character likes to be called, is played by Zac Efron, in a solid comedic performance and one that also emotionally keeps up with the story's ever-shifting intentions. The setup for the movie is the same as the aforementioned true-life story, with Chickie lazing about in his parents' home by day and drinking heavily at a local bar at night, while he waits for another job aboard a ship.

The first hints of Farrelly's later struggles with the mounting severity of the tale arrive early with the movie's on-the-nose and right-down-the-middle view of the conflicting views on Vietnam at the time. There's the perspective of Chickie and others, such the veteran owner (played by Bill Murray) of his favorite haunt, that the war is a righteous one because the government says it is, while questioning it is as unpatriotic as one can get. Then, there's the point of view of his sister Christine (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) and her fellow anti-war protestors, who don't believe the government's rationale for a variety of mostly unexplored reasons. The strangest part of the movie's own perspective is how it stays right in the center, even while making an increasing point to show what a mess the conflict has become by the time Chickie arrives in Vietnam.

As for the rest of the plot, it follows Chickie on his ill-advised trek overseas, partly to show support to his buddies and partly because everyone doubts he has the ambition to do something like that. He does, though, much to the shock, horror, amusement, bemusement, and anger of the soldiers he encounters. With a deadline of three days before his ship sails back from Saigon, Chickie has to walk, hitchhike, and find other means of getting from the city to assorted camps and combat zones.

A running gag is that everyone in the military assumes a tourist like Chickie must be a "tourist" with the CIA, although that joke hits a pretty rough end when our protagonist actually ends up on a helicopter with an actual spy, interrogating and then disposing of a prisoner of questionable intelligence value. It's difficult to tell which is most jarring: the suddenly dark turn of that scene, the choice of music as we watch a man fall to his death, or how Farrelly clearly has no idea how reckon with such horrors as that, various moments of combat, and an assault on Saigon that puts Chickie's return trip in jeopardy.

The problem, simply, is that Farrelly's light touch and fleet-footed approach to the comedy doesn't carry the needed weight for how cynical, how angry, and how confounded some of this material becomes. Chickie finds himself running through gunfire, evading murderous CIA agents, and dodging and weaving through the scene of urban combat with photojournalist Coates (Russell Crowe, quite good as the voice of pragmatic reason), and while his viewpoint on the war evolves, the filmmakers stay planted in the middle, clearly unwilling to offend or side with anyone on all of the issues they dance around narratively and thematically.

Obviously, Farrelly wants The Greatest Beer Run Ever to be as seriously minded as it is funny. In the right hands, comedy can be serious and sobering business, but those of the filmmakers, unfortunately, are not such hands.

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