A film review by Craig J. Koban October 11, 2022

THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER

2022, R, 126 mins.

Zac Efron as John 'Chickie' Donohue  /  Russell Crowe as Arthur Coates  /  Kyle Allen as Bobby Pappas  /  Bill Murray as The Colonel  /  Jake Picking as Rick Duggan  /  Will Ropp as Kevin McLoone  /  Archie Renaux as Tom Collins  /  Ruby Ashbourne Serkis as Christine  /  Will Hochman as Tommy Minogue  /  Christopher Reed Brown as Noodle  /  Kevin Tran as Hieu 'Oklahoma'

Hey, did you hear the one about the crazy New Yorker that decided to sneak his way into the Vietnam War in order to bring his fellow besties that were serving in the military there some well earned brewskies? 

If this was the premise for any fictional film then I would have never been able to take it seriously...at all.  

But director Peter Farrelly's very aptly titled THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER (his first film since his Best Picture winning GREEN BOOK) is indeed based on the very difficult to swallow, but very true story of John "Chickie" Donahue, a down on his luck merchant seaman that came up with the mother of all crazy plans to journey to Vietnam in 1967 to delivery some goddamn American beer to his fellow friends and their soldiers as a gesture of appreciation.  

At one point in the film a soldier chimes in "Every once in awhile you run into a guy that's too dumb to get killed" and I have to kind of agree with this sentiment.  

As dumb as this whole cockamamie scheme was, Chickie did indeed partake in it and, to be fair, was successful in getting his bros some beer while not getting dead in the process (in real life, Chickie and four of his soldier buddies that fought in the war - and survived - still regularly get together to this day).  To say that this beyond wacky - but, yes, fact based - war comedy takes a certain suspension of disbelief is a major understatement, and despite some rough edges and some schizophrenic tonal shifting throughout, I have to admit that I found it really difficult to pull myself out of this film's utterly ridiculous, but fascinating you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it vortex.   

That, and THE GREATEST BEER RUN features an arguably never-been-better Zac Efron as the equal parts brave, dopey, and, yeah, perhaps really dumb Chickie, who can never be criticized, I guess, for going the extra mile for his friends (actually, make that nearly 12,000 miles if one considers how far 'Murica is from 'Nam).  We meet this loveable sad sack in 1967 as someone with little ambition in life, other than to party deep into the night and sleep his hangovers away until mid day.  This lifestyle greatly annoys Chickie's papa, who thinks it's disgraceful that his son has amounted to very little in his life when so many of his pals have decided to serve their country and fight Communists in Vietnam (or, drafted into fighting).  Chickie is a die hard patriot, but naively believes that Vietnam is a just-war, much like his friends still at home and his favorite watering hole's owner (played by an initially unrecognizable Bill Murray).  Chickie grows very upset with the frequent sight of his sister (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) engaging in frequent and very public anti-war protests, which Chickie thinks is a sin against all of the fighting men.  With a both a dad that hates his laziness and a fiercely anti-war sibling that urges her brother to do something to make a difference, Chickie decides that it's his time to act in a meaningful way... 

He's going to hand deliver beer to the soldiers in 'Nam. 

Wait...what?! 

Predictably, most of his friends and family back home think he's beyond cuckoo, but Chickie is serious - like, deadly serious - about packing his large duffle bag with beer and giving it to the boys from the neighborhood - and any other soldier that wants one.  Now, how does one just get into Vietnam during the height of the war and without drawing needless attention?  Using his Merchant Marine status, Chickie is able to secure a ride on a military boat (providing that he serves as a laborer during the long trip), but once he lands there he's given just three days to complete his "mission" and get back to the boat.  If he blows it and is late, then he's stuck in Vietnam.  No problem, thinks the eternally optimistic Chickie, who departs off of the vessel in civilian clothes and his beer filled sack (like an everyman Santa Claus), but simply locating soldiers (and without any of the locals or military officials assisting him with his plan) proves to be much harder than he thinks.  His initial run-ins with soldiers are amusingly on-point, with many of the best laughs in the film coming from their incredulous reactions.  Miraculously, Chickie is able to make progress on his trip, but he very slowly, but surely, gets a large teaspoon of reality medicine when he soon discovers that maybe - just maybe - the Vietnam War isn't the black and white just-war that he thought.  When he stumbles into a chance meeting with a long-term war journalist/photographer, Arthur (played well by Russell Crowe), Chickie discovers even more about the darker side of America's involvement in Vietnam and the true barbaric horrors of war. 

Again, the sheer lunacy of THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER kept me oddly invested, for the most part, in seeing just how far this man would go in order to get his buds some Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer.  Farrelly bases his film on the book of the same name by Donahue himself and Joanna Molloy, and I can see how it appealed to him.  You can question the nonchalant carelessness of Chickie (despite what he sees are the best and most honorable of intentions) and easily ridicule his absolute reckless scheme, but you can also admire his commitment to it, if not his ability to brush off any potential harm that could come his way.  I mean, you'd have to be equal parts brave and idiotic to thrust yourself into any war to have a meet and greet with friends over some suds...right?  And "Goodtime Chickie" - as his buds labeled him, obviously well earned - is appropriately shown as a noble minded man-child buffoon with a truly big heart that allowed himself to be thrust into the lion's den of war, so to speak, without a care in the world to his own well being.  Chickie may have been nuttier than a fruit cake and foolishly blind as to the realties of war (which, no doubt, were ingrained in him by stories of the worthy cause of WWII by his friends and family back home), but he was unwavering in his determination.  You gotta give him that.  

Farrelly is good as exploring the super tight knit microcosm of Chickie's life back home, and THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER definitely does a good job of immersing us in his New York neighborhood and the colorful personalities that - for better or worse - influence the lad on his mission to come.  The film truly gets on the ground running when the in-over-his-head Chickie makes it to Vietnam and has to think on his feet (thinking, though, is not his strongest suit) to bluff his way into the warzones (the first scene when one high ranking military brass mistakenly thinks he's CIA is pretty priceless).  Equally funny is how all of the soldiers that he comes in contact with - including, uh-huh, his friends - think he has totally lost it, but Chickie dismisses any of their concerns with an "Aw, shucks" homebrewed gumption.  It's only when Chickie has contact with Crowe's world weary and beaten down war correspondent that he has his tunnel vision about war deeply opened up.  This photographer has an impossibly hard time understanding why Chickie has such die-hard devotion to LBJ and his administration's handling of the conflict.  To be fair, Crowe's character is more of a plot device than a fully realized flesh and blood character, but he does take a strange liking to Chickie and the inherent madness of his mission, but he also wants to show him how the government can't be trusted in its reporting of war progress, not to mention that the war has led to unspeakable violence and corruption on multiple fronts.  In his mind, the whole war is "one big crime scene."

I think where THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER started to lose me was in the handling of its core messages and the overall character arc of Chickie himself.  The sermonizing that the film engages in isn't exactly introduced with subtlety and instead is methodically hammered home.  There are some clear-cut parallels between this film and Farrelly's last historical film GREEN BOOK (which, yes, didn't deserve to win Best Picture, but didn't, in my mind, deserve some of the vitriol it received) in terms of both having blue-collar working class stiffs that have their perception of reality vastly expanded when introduced to a macabre side of the world they were previously never exposed to (plus, both were period films inspired by true stories).  I liked the early stages of Chickie's madcap journey and how he luckily traverses in and out of safety and danger in sporadic fashion.  He's a wide eyed idealist in the first half of the film that later comes to realize the futility of this war and how his whole plan might be putting others in grave danger as well.  I think that this man's transition wasn't handled as organically and credibly as Farrelly thinks it is in the final film, and when Chickie does return home and tries to school his drinking buddies about the unspeakable trauma of what's actually going on in Vietnam it all comes off as awkwardly forced.  I don't doubt that the real Chickie had a radical change of heart, but as presented in the story here it simply doesn't feel nourished enough to pay off to satisfying effect. 

Farrelly took a lot of flack over GREEN BOOK, maybe because his past resume of helming crude, but hysterical comedies like DUMB & DUMBER, THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY, and (the funniest film of the 90s) KINGPIN somehow precluded that he had no business helming a drama about toxic racism in the Jim Crow-era south.  I sincerely don't think that any filmmaker should be shunned for going outside their comfort zones, but you can be critical of their execution of making said films in those uncharted zones, for sure.  I think GREEN BOOK is a far better made period film than THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER MADE, and Farrelly's latest attempts at fusing comedy and drama set within the viewfinder of 1960s history is more hit and miss in approach and overall execution.  However, if you excuse its somewhat simplistic handling of the limitless complexities of the Vietnam War and the less than authentic strokes of the main character's journey of self-discovery, I can't deny that I found THE GREATEST BEER RUN absurdly entertaining in parts, and a lot of that is in large part to Efron himself, who has never been an actor of memorable range, but here he thanklessly carries the unbound ludicrousness of Chickie's journey with such an affable level of silly charm.  Chickie may be a hopelessly tone deaf goofball, but Efron makes it hard to dislike this rascal.  I found myself stubbornly rooting him on...and this film in general.