It’s also important to look past the relatively unimportant title of Apple TV’s newest film, which stars Zac Efron and Russell Crowe but may not be traditional Oscars fodder.
The Greatest Beer Run Ever sounds more like the name of a LadBible video than a movie that was released during awards season.
The story Peter Farrelly has selected for his most recent project has garnered a lot of curiosity because his previous movie, Green Book, earned the best picture in 2019.
In 1968, US Marine Chickie Donohue traveled around the world to bring a crate of beer to his friends who were serving in the Vietnam War. This is the actual story of The Greatest Beer Run Ever.
The New Yorker embarked on a four-month journey carrying a (likely very heavy) pack of beer on his back to boost the soldiers’ morale at the time.
Delivering beer to neighborhood enlistees is amusing—at least, it is until Donohue arrives and is forced to face the grim reality of war. The excursion is described as “the worst idea I ever heard” by one of the characters. Despite having served in the Marines for four years, Donohue had never engaged in combat.
After the movie’s Toronto debut, Farrelly told reporters earlier this month, “Tonally, it starts to light.” “The idea that this guy would try to deliver a beer to his friends in Vietnam is just absurd, and you can see him grinning. However, when he arrives in Vietnam, reality sets in, and his tone changes naturally.
“It didn’t take much work on my end, but it took a lot of work on [Efron’s] because he had to change along the road,” the actor said.
“I couldn’t believe that was a true story; it simply sounded like a very ridiculous concept and like a young, naive person,” Efron adds. However, the trip that begins there is really profound and amazing. As a result, it turned out to be one of the coolest actions you could take.
The film’s tone comes out as a little disjointed, but that’s mostly because the original expedition must have had a similar tone. The background of bombs, fatalities, and blood seems to contradict what Donohue is attempting in some way.
However, Zac Efron counters that “there’s always something unique or comes out of the tension that can make you laugh,” adding that “I love the human element you’re able to uncover in some of the worst situations.”
Farrelly continues, “What interested me was that it was a guy walking into a combat zone, in the middle of an act of war, to carry beer to his pals. I admire the person for his bravado, foolishness, and the amount of heart it takes to desire to do something like that and accomplish it.
The movie has gotten a mixed bag of early reviews. Beer Run, according to Kate Erbland of IndieWire, “is not a gritty war movie; it’s slick and amusing and frequently fun. A tale by Farrelly involves both irrational hope and naive faith.
She did, however, concede that for some viewers, the gap between pure enjoyment and the Tet Offensive would be too great.
Other critics were considerably less enthused. According to Michael Rechtshaffen of The Hollywood Reporter, it is “a meandering, incoherent production that tries to achieve a satisfying tone throughout,” and Charles Bramesco of The Guardian claims it “regurgitates every Vietnam cliché with the laziest imaginable visual language.”
But Apple TV+ will be hoping The Greatest Beer Run Ever is firmly on Academy voters’ radar as it already has one best picture prize under its credit thanks to the 2021 surprise hit Coda.
It is the most recent in a long string of road trip movies for Farrelly, who claims that this is just a coincidence.
He observes that practically all of his films are about road trips. “I don’t sure why, but road trips appear in Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, There’s Something About Mary, Three Stooges, and Green Book.
“I spent my entire childhood living in the same house; we never traveled anyplace.” (You’re making amends now!) Efron contributes. I adore road movies, but I don’t think about them consciously, so maybe that’s part of the problem.
The tale was first brought to Farrelly’s attention by a 12-minute YouTube documentary about the expedition, which was uploaded five years prior. The movie is an adaptation of the book Donohue wrote about his adventure and was published in 2020.
Efron claims that Donohue is most driven by a “pure sense of affection for his buddies.”
He does not, however, have all the solutions. He has the guts to just sort of put himself out there and carries out a pretty insane concept that he had while intoxicated.
“I think there’s a lesson in this movie. Vietnam was a horrific war, and we didn’t recognize it at first,” says Farrelly in his conclusion. When I say “we,” I’m referring to Americans who mistakenly believed that World War Two was underway.
“It took years for the truth to surface, but by the 1970s, Americans had finally begun to understand the truth about what that war was: it was a catastrophe, it was horrible, and it didn’t assist anyone. It was useless, and many Americans and far more Vietnamese people died.
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