The Greatest Beer Run Ever Movie Review: Zac Efron’s War Comedy Is Too Funny To Take Seriously

The filmmaker’s sequel to the controversial Best Picture-winning Green Book was awaited with cautious optimism by an industry convinced its triumph was a mistake. In the end, few supported the Academy’s decision to honor an already-forgotten film more than the crowd-pleasing Black Panther and the far more acclaimed (and accomplished) Roma. was said to be so upset by the whole thing that he turned his back on the stage when Farrelly and his team went up to receive the Oscars. “I thought I was courtside in the garden, but the referee made a bad call,” he told reporters in the press room, flute in hand.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever is, for better or worse, a movie that shares a tone with the Green Book. That means the tone is all over the place. It combines the filmmaker’s renewed desire for legitimacy with his penchant for turning every moment into screwball comedy, regardless of how serious it is.

John “Chicky” Donahue, played by Zac Efron, like many of his childhood peers, makes up for his lack of active participation in the Vietnam War by coming up with the most ridiculous schemes. A lazy merchant sailor. After his father has had a number of “sharmagika his beta arguments” with him, Chicky, having time to kill and tame his guilt, packs a duffel his bag full of beer cans and takes a cargo ship. I planned to board the and decided to deliver. alcohol to his deployed friends. Amazingly, his run on Best Beer of All Time is based on a true story.

But what could have been a Forrest Gump-style epic about America turns into an undisciplined Efron ride in which Knucklehead Chicky discovers the glory of the liberal lifestyle. Chicky physically pulls his sister away from the anti-war movement, later angering a journalist. Russell Crowe — for writing only demoralizing stories about the conflict. How do armies find the strength to go on? As he ventures from one Vietnamese military camp to another, he discovers a harsh truth.

The movie doesn’t capture the gravity of the situation. There are exactly two locals that Chicky meets more than once during his travels, both of whom are problematically submissive. One of them, a bartender who seems unperturbed by the war, is keenly aware of his country’s history of being invaded by people with a belligerent foreign policy. The other is an American-awe-inspiring police officer who promises to find out if Chicky visits New York.

It’s as if the actors were contractually obligated to perform as if they were in an old-fashioned war comedy. It seems like a throwback to his 90s when the Farrelly brothers like the Cohens and Wachowskis teamed up. And this got me thinking. If The Greatest Beer Run had been released 20 years before him, perhaps Jack Black or Adam Sandler In the lead role, especially for the kind of tone the movie is trying to strike. In a way, Efron is miscast in the role, but don’t get me wrong, he’s very good at it.

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The film cuts corners not only thematically but also visually. A lot of it feels manufactured, as if the set was put down just hours before the cameras started rolling. A shot involving a helicopter) looks pretty good. But for a movie that spent a good amount of time in Vietnam in the 60s, it never looks as authentic. I’m not saying it, but it didn’t even have to be a MASH episode.

“I’m not doing it for laughs,” Chicky says at one point in the film. But it looks like Farrelly.

Best beer run ever
directed by – Peter Farrelly
cast – Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, Bill Murray
evaluation – 2/5