War is hell, and so too is The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Peter Farrelly’s follow-up to 2018’s Best Picture-winning Green Book, whose glib and corny template it duplicates to dismal ends. Another 1960s-set based-on-real-events tale about conservative-liberal frictions in a divided country that involves a road trip through enemy territory and concludes with empty can’t-we-all-get-along platitudes, it’s a pat and wishy-washy rehash of the director’s prior hit, except with a Saving Private Ryan hook and a sitcom-grade wartime sheen.
Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival before landing in theaters and—aptly, given its limp visuals—Apple TV+ on Sept. 30, The Greatest Beer Run Ever is the story of John “Chickie” Donahue” (Zac Efron), a 26-year-old Merchant Marine-turned-layabout in 1967 Inwood, New York. Chickie, who spends his days sleeping at his parents’ house and his nights drinking at the neighborhood pub with his buddies, is a going-nowhere loser who’s meant to be winning because he’s played by Efron, who boasts a goofy Welcome Back Kotter mustache and exudes aww-shucks charm with maximum effort and minimal results. Though he’s disconnected from life, Chickie is a staunch supporter of the Vietnam War—aligning him with his mates, his parents and old-school bartender The Colonel (Bill Murray), but putting him at odds with his sister Christine (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, daughter of Andy), who’s in with a protesting crowd that Chickie and his moron pal decide to fight.
Chickie spouts bromides about how the U.S. government must know what it’s doing, and that criticism of the war (by hippies and the media) is inherently bad because it undercuts the nation’s chances for success—dumb takes that sound even dumber coming out of know-nothing Chickie’s mouth. One night, he seizes upon a jokey remark by the Colonel and agrees to support the troops—and, in particular, those servicemen hailing from Inwood—by going overseas and bringing them cans of beer transported in one of the Colonel’s duffle bags. Everyone thinks Chickie is full of it, both because this is an idiotic idea and because Chickie never follows through on anything he starts, be it a job, school or getting out of bed for church. Mocked by his friends and relatives, he decides to prove them all wrong by doing “something,” and thanks to his (oft-derided) military credentials, he hops aboard a transport ship and is in Saigon in no time flat with a stash of domestic brews.
The ease with which Efron’s Pabst-a Clause makes it to ’Nam is absurd, but it’s part and parcel of The Greatest Beer Run Ever’s chintzy plotting. No matter his newfound Oscar bona fides, Farrelly—who made his name helming Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary with his brother Bobby—has the storytelling instincts of a comedy director, as evidenced by the episodic structure of Chickie’s journey and, more pressing still, the simplistic and trivial nature of his saga’s conflicts and resolutions. Scene after scene finds Chickie arriving somewhere, being looked at with amazement and scorn, discovering an obstacle in his path, and swiftly figuring out a (ridiculous) way to overcome it. Just in terms of basic narrative mechanics, the film—regardless of its general roots in reality—is full of it every step of the way.
Farrelly compounds this shallowness by shooting The Greatest Beer Run Ever with zero verve and even less authenticity. Although Chickie describes Vietnam as “chaotic,” the country presented here feels like a bunch of makeshift sets populated by young actors playing Platoon dress-up. A few dutiful shots of carnage aside, Farrelly keeps the proceedings palatably bloodless lest he strike a nerve in the mainstream viewers he’s so clearly courting, especially with every political conversation between Chickie and those he encounters, including jaded correspondent Arthur Coates (Russell Crowe, coasting through a gruff voice-of-reason supporting part). In those egregiously facile chats, Chickie contends that reporting disparaging or unflattering truths harms American morale and strength, and Arthur counters by stating that lies, not the truth, damage the nation. Despite one of these arguments pulling a lot more weight than the other, the discussion is left in a veritable stalemate—a both-sides-ism tack that Farrelly again employs with regard to Chickie’s climactic perspective on the campaign.
The Greatest Beer Run Ever is superficially about Chickie’s desire to raise his buddy’s spirits by toasting a beer with them, as well as to find his friend Tommy (Archie Renaux), who’s missing in action. Yet Farrelly, Brian Currie and Pete Jones’ script is, from the moment go, transparently about how this odyssey transforms Chickie. Consequently, the film feigns concern about enlisted American boys and the scores of dead Vietnamese lying in the street while shamelessly using them (and their suffering) as devices designed to teach Chickie lessons about the complex gravity of war. Worse, the film is so desperate to avoid taking a stance—because that might offend someone on either side of the political spectrum—that it ultimately has Chickie undergo only the weakest sort of revelatory change of heart. He may learn that American leaders lie, and that Vietnam is a pointless endeavor, but Chickie can’t come out and really speak his mind, both because he doesn’t have one to begin with and because Farrelly is determined to wrap things up on a meek, non-confrontational note.
Efron embodies Chickie as a quasi-Forrest Gump doofus who’s “too dumb to get killed,” stumbling and bumbling his way through combat zones by posing as a CIA agent, and undergoing the sorts of epiphanies about Vietnam that have long since become obvious, well-established facts. Farrelly’s infatuation with Dave Palmer’s parodically earnest soft-piano score suggests that he thinks he’s delivering profound bombshells rather than clichés, which crescendo with Chickie’s experiences in the thick of the Tet Offensive, replete with the contrived death of a likable local. However, in its refusal to say something brave and meaningful—instead indulging in wan dialogue about journalism, presidential deception, and the wisdom of foreign military intervention without assuming anything approaching an actual viewpoint—what the film really expresses is political and moral cowardice masquerading as “timeliness.”
