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Peter Farrelly ’s glib and superficial “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” has the nerve to give several of its characters speeches about how war is nothing like what we see on television or in movies, embedded in a movie that’s about as a realistic about combat, trauma, and death as a high school play. It’s not just a bad movie—those are common enough to be dismissible—but a movie that I found grossly condescending and manipulative, a dramedy that’s so deeply unconcerned with its actual true story other than how it can be crafted to emotionally impact an audience. A lot of critics came down hard on “ Green Book ,” an admittedly inferior Best Picture winner, and I started to wonder if this film wasn’t made just so people would be nicer to Farrelly’s last movie by comparison.

Based on the book by Joanna Molloy and John “Chickie” Donohue, “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” tells the latter’s true story of a misguided delivery to an active international conflict, where he learned, "Yes, Vietnam was bad." We meet Chickie (a miscast Zac Efron ) in New York City in 1967, aimless enough that his dad gives him a hard time for sleeping in and lacking motivation. He spends most of his time at the bar with his buddies, even as they watch friends go off to Vietnam and never come home again. When one of his closest allies goes M.I.A., Chickie has a crazy idea one drunken evening—what if he brought all of his buddies a beer? Just to show them that NYC still loves them? Egged on by fellow barmates, including a proprietor played by a speechifying Bill Murray , Chickie decides to get on a cargo ship headed to 'Nam to find the guys. All he has to do is spend two months on a ship, find people he knows in a large country in the middle of a war, give them some encouraging suds, and find his way home again. No problem, right?

Chickie fights with his sister ( Ruby Ashbourne Serkis ) over the at-home response to the war, arguing that protests diminish the sacrifice of the men on the ground. And he says directly to press members he meets in Vietnam, including one played by Russell Crowe named Arthur Coates, that they’re only reporting on the bad stuff from the war. He’s there to bring some light to a dark situation, and to remind the boys that they’re supported. Of course, anyone who’s seen a movie or read a book understands that Chickie is going to learn a harsh lesson about the truth of actual war while he’s on his beer run, and here’s where Farrelly’s limited range as a filmmaker becomes a significant problem.

Someone says about Chickie, “Every once in a while, you run into a guy who’s too dumb to get killed.” It’s meant to be a humorous line, but it reveals the foundational flaw of “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” in that Chickie is written and played poorly. He needs to be almost a Hal Ashby character, someone pushed through the world in a way that reflects the kind of ignorance that often keeps people alive, but he’s sketched instead as a working-class hero, a heartfelt guy who’s more courageous than stupid. That's a tough sell. There’s a vastly superior version of this film that’s more comfortable mocking Chickie’s naïveté instead of using it for heartfelt speeches about dying friends.

The script here by Farrelly, Brian Currie, and Pete Jones seems almost afraid to judge Chickie, which gives the movie no redemption arc at all. Sure, it goes through the motions of Chickie discovering that war really is Hell, but it’s all so superficially rendered that it never feels like an actual journey. And one can’t shake how Chickie is kind of an entitled jerk. The film wants to present him as a wide-eyed optimist who discovers the truth, but he’s constantly putting people in harm’s way in a manner that makes one want to punch him in the face instead of root for him. He’s just a wildly misjudged character on every level. And don’t get me started on how the film uses a Vietnamese local who befriends Chickie only to be dispatched in a way to push the audience’s buttons. The actual country and people who lived, fought, and died there are only interesting in how they shape the growth of a dumb kid from NYC. Ugh.

The only one who gets out of this cinematic conflict unscathed is Crowe, who feels like he walked in from the set of a much more interesting movie about journalism. He conveys a believable curiosity in Chickie, someone who he tries to teach and protect, but Farrelly’s film doesn’t give him nearly enough screen time to drag the movie into something more believable. He’s too content with half-assed jokes and war drama, never finding nearly enough of either to justify the interminable 126-minute runtime of this film, one that legitimately felt longer than anything I’ve seen this year. They should have called it “The Longest Beer Run Ever,” but that would require something this movie is offensively uninterested in delivering: honesty.

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Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022)

Rated R for language and some war violence.

126 minutes

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'

Peter Farrelly
Brian Hayes Currie

Cinematographer

Sean Porter
Patrick J. Don Vito
Dave Palmer

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The Greatest Beer Run Ever Reviews

In its two-hour runtime, the drama makes you chuckle and cry in equal measure, and all credits go to the writers for the characterisation of the protagonist, and to Zac Efron and Russell Crowe’s performances.

Full Review | Nov 20, 2023

Never mind that the Pabst Blue Ribbon Chickie carries throughout The Greatest Beer Run Ever has got to be the warmest in history. It symbolizes the character’s resolve and pride in what he believes is a nice gesture of goodwill.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Farrelly's screenplays present characters as surface-level and Efron doesn't have the dramatic range to try and create a character out of an archetype.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 16, 2023

Further proof that Farrelly did better, more charming work when he ballasted his soft side with raunch.

Full Review | May 2, 2023

It’ll get you acquainted with a guy who didn’t think impossible was a thing. It’s a detached joy to watch a movie where a character does something you would never dare do, and later find out that it really happened.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Feb 9, 2023

The Greatest Beer Run Ever gets so close to being a good movie but is held back by weak dialogue and never quite just saying what it means to be saying about war, masculinity, politics, or otherwise.

Full Review | Original Score: 6.5/10 | Jan 4, 2023

…has a jarring mix of tones to play with as it fuses comic macho braggadocio with the fog of war, but Peter Farrelly’s the right man for the job and just about pulls it off…

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 2, 2023

Ultimately, The Greatest Beer Run Ever leaves a bit of a bad taste in your mouth. It doesn’t have anything meaningful to say about the war and offers a surface-level exploration of the character of Chickie.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 19, 2022

What an unbelievable story, but truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction. Efron displays such an earnest quality that makes the character’s inherent foolishness endearing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 3, 2022

Farrelly seems to have thought Beer Run would float along on its frothy premise, punctuated by the occasional explosion of wartime violence. Instead, the film stumbles tipsily along, from lamp post to lamp post, uncertain of its way home.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 26, 2022

[It's] is fueled equally by its far-fetched silliness and its growing sense of sadness -- if not outrage -- over the war’s toll. Toss in a couple of fine supporting performances... and you’ve got a film that will stand up under repeated viewings.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Oct 20, 2022

Imagine watching Born on the Fourth of July without the drama and Good Morning, Vietnam with the comedy and that roughly sums up this poorly calculated tale.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 16, 2022

It's sort of meandering and well-meaning, but the tone never quite settled on what it's supposed to be.

Full Review | Oct 14, 2022

Tonally shifty, overlong, repetitive and as history simplistic, but well-made and an interesting effort to reach across the aisle from the socially liberal to the socially conservative.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 13, 2022

Every potential moment of clarity is interrupted by a knee-jerk swerve to the inane, as if Farrelly is uncomfortable with anything resembling discomfort or ambiguity. It’s all very well-intentioned and good-natured, but to what end?

Full Review | Oct 13, 2022

Efron is very good in this movie that is undecided as to whether or not it is a comedy or a drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Oct 11, 2022

In view of the absurd setting and the talent gathered, one expected more.

Full Review | Oct 11, 2022

While Murray and Crowe are fine in their respective roles, it's Efron who truly carries The Greatest Beer Run Ever. His transition from happy-go-lucky beer delivery boy to a man who has witnessed the horrors of war is masterfully handled.

Full Review | Oct 7, 2022

With a bit more prestige under Peter Farrelly's belt, and the opportunity to expand his scope, this is a pretty solid war drama spiked with occasional humor.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Oct 7, 2022

The Greatest Beer Run Ever never fully reaches its potential, as there are unexplored themes and pacing problems. That being said, Efron is excellent, and the film finds its footing later on. There are plenty of emotionally resonant moments.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Oct 6, 2022

Cast & crew
User reviews

The Greatest Beer Run Ever

A man's story of leaving New York in 1967 to bring beer to his childhood buddies in the Army while they are fighting in Vietnam. A man's story of leaving New York in 1967 to bring beer to his childhood buddies in the Army while they are fighting in Vietnam. A man's story of leaving New York in 1967 to bring beer to his childhood buddies in the Army while they are fighting in Vietnam.

Peter Farrelly
Brian Hayes Currie
Russell Crowe
Jake Picking
140 User reviews
66 Critic reviews
39 Metascore
1 nomination

Chickie Donohue

Arthur Coates

Rick Duggan

Bobby Pappas

Tom Collins

Kevin McLoone

Tommy Minogue

Lt. Habershaw

Hieu 'Oklahoma'
(as Kevin Tran)
Christine Donohue

The Colonel

Mrs. Minogue

Mr. Donohue

Mrs. Donohue

All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia Based on the book of the same name. A memoir written by John "Chick" Donohue and J.T. Molloy about Donohue's eight weeks in Vietnam delivering beer to his friends and other soldiers in combat.
Goofs "Coates is seen wearing a kaffiyeh (a traditional Arab head scarf) around his neck. The kaffiyeh did not become a fashion accessory among westerners until the 1980s." Coatses is a war correspondent, so he would have traveled all over the world, and could have well reported from the Middle East, where he could have easily acquired a kaffiyeh.

Chickie Donohue : Don't be dumb, Arthur. This ain't a war no more. It's mass murder.

Coates : That's what war is, Chick. It's one giant crime scene.

Crazy credits SPOILER: at the end of the movie, we find out what happened to Tommy Minogue. The info reads as follows: "Tommy Minogue willingly sacrificed his life to save the lives of his commanding officer and the soldiers in his company. There is a grass roots effort to award him the medal of honor."
Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: This Movie was Shockingly Terrible - Best and Worst of TIFF 2022 (2022)
Soundtracks Soul Finger Written by Jimmy King , Ben Cauley , James Alexander , Ronnie Caldwell , Carl Cunningham , Phalon R. Jones Jr. Performed by The Bar-Kays Courtesy of Atlantic Recording Corp. By arrangement with Warner Music Group Film & TV Licensing

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours 6 minutes
Dolby Digital

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The Greatest Beer Run Ever Tells the True Story of One Truly Clueless Guy

F ormer Disney Channel heartthrob and song-and-dance man extraordinaire Zac Efron should be a much bigger star than he is, though maybe it’s better this way: those of us who love him can be happy whenever he shows up, without having to worry about Efron overkill. In Peter Farrelly’s Greatest Beer Run Ever, Efron plays Chickie Donohue, a young Merchant Mariner from the Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood who, circa 1967, treks to Saigon and beyond to deliver cans of American beer to his neighborhood buddies fighting in the Vietnam War. The ludicrousness of the journey is the whole point: Chickie, along with his pals at home, thinks his soldier friends are fighting for a noble cause. That has sparked some friction with his anti-war-protester sister (played by Ruby Ashbourne Serkis); like plenty of people at the time, Chickie hasn’t grasped that being anti-war doesn’t necessarily mean you’re anti-soldier, and he feels the need to step up and show his support for his buddies in a big way. So the local bartender known as the Colonel (Bill Murray) loads up a duffel bag with Pabst Blue Ribbon, and Chickie signs up for a merchant ship headed for Vietnam, talking his way through war zones with guileless charm.

It all sounds just crazy enough to be a true story, and basically, it is. There was a real-life John “Chickie” Donohue who made such a run, and four of the buddies to whom he delivered warm brewskis survived the war—reportedly, the guys still get together regularly for dinner. But just because a movie is based on a true story doesn’t mean you have to fully buy it: The Greatest Beer Run Ever , now on Apple TV+, isn’t terrible, and it’s hardly great. But the worst thing you can say about it is that it’s almost as dreamily clueless as its hapless hero is. On the one hand, Chickie is so well-intentioned that it’s hard not to feel warmly toward him. On the other, in stupidly planning one of his surprise visits, he nearly gets one of his buddies killed. You begin to think this guy is really sort of a jerk.

But then, it’s Zac Efron we’re talking about. The Greatest Beer Run might have been a total disaster with any other star, but Efron—sporting a Tom Selleck-style mustache and looking perfectly affable in his dorky plaid shirts—manages to keep the movie on track with sheer laid-back charisma. One of the movie’s recurring jokes is Chickie’s ability to slip into heavily restricted war zones because the Army higher-ups think he’s CIA. (It must be those dorky plaid shirts.) It’s a joke until it’s not—at one point he runs afoul of a real CIA agent who’s just done something nefarious, and that endangers Chickie’s life. But of course, he escapes, and manages to keep delivering those beers. His dauntless bonhomie also wins over a crusty war correspondent, Russell Crowe’s Coates. And eventually, he becomes hip to the grim reality of this particular war and its ruthlessness. “This ain’t a war no more,” he tells Coates, wide-eyed as a lemur. “It’s mass murder.” Coates replies solemnly, “That’s what war is, Chickie. It’s one giant crime scene.”

Cornpone like that abounds in The Greatest Beer Run. (The script is by Farrelly, Pete Jones, and Brian Hayes Currie.) Still, to hold this movie up as any kind of mortal sin against filmmaking is both silly and unfair. Farrelly made his name directing open-hearted, if crude, comedies with his brother, Bobby Farrelly, pictures like Dumb & Dumber and There’s Something About Mary. In 2018, he attracted a great deal of ire with Green Book, another movie based on a true story, that of a trip taken by jazz pianist and intellectual Don Shirley (played by Mahershala Ali ) with his white bodyguard Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) through the Jim Crow-era South. The movie won three Oscars—Best Original Screenplay, Best Picture and, for Ali’s performance, Best Supporting Actor—though by the time the awards were given, the film had already angered many viewers over what they saw as its racist overtones. One claim was that Farrelly had failed to consult with Shirley’s surviving relatives and had basically highjacked a Black man’s story for his own cheerful aims, with the goal of making white folks feel good about themselves.

There’s some validity to the idea that Green Book ’s casual feel-goodism could be read as nostalgia for the good old days of rigid Black-and-white divisions. But that doesn’t track with Farrelly’s past work: the movies he made with his brother used crass humor to locate the best qualities in human beings. If his approach in Green Book was misguided , it’s harder to make the case that it was an act of racist calculation. The Greatest Beer Run Ever betrays a similar naivete. Farrelly’s great sin here is that he just wants to tell a nice story about a guy who did a crazy thing and learned some valuable lessons in the process. It doesn’t fully work, but it’s not a crime against humanity. And Efron carries the whole thing ably on his shoulders. His Chickie is a goofball loser at the beginning and a believably conscientious citizen by the end—the earnestness in Efron’s eyes guarantees it. “Less drinkin’, more thinkin’,” is his new ambition, as he tells his sister. It’s all totally absurd. But plenty of real-life people have done stupider things and lived to tell the tale.

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The Greatest Beer Run Ever Wastes a Very Good Zac Efron

It’s hard to tell if The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a comedy that wants to be a drama or a drama that wants to be a comedy. Of course, a film can be both. This one, alas, is neither. The tale of John “Chickie” Donohue, an Inwood, New York, resident who, in late 1967, decided to take a duffel bag full of beer to his buddies serving in Vietnam, Peter Farrelly’s film is based on a wild true story — this is both the most fascinating thing about the picture and its biggest problem. The filmmakers seem so impressed with the fact that all this really happened that they haven’t done the work necessary onscreen to convince us that something like this could really happen.

We see Chickie (Zac Efron) in the film’s early scenes hanging out at his local Irish bar where the war in Vietnam occasionally shows up as an upsetting news item. “Bringing dead soldiers, guys with no arms or legs, into our living rooms is not helping no one,” says the bar’s gruff owner, a veteran called the Colonel (Bill Murray actually playing someone other than himself this time). “If they had showed the Battle of the Bulge on TV, we’d have quit after three days.” Even though several of Chickie’s friends are serving abroad, his understanding of the war is basic and unquestioning; at one point, he gets into a fight with a group of protesters (among them, his sister) not because of any firmly held beliefs but because he’s just learned that a good friend has been declared missing in action and doesn’t want to believe his friend may have died in vain.

Chickie has all the surface qualities of a potentially interesting and relatable character, but the script, by Farrelly, Brian Currie, and Pete Jones, keeps everything strictly at the level of dialogue. “There’s a lot of things you say you’ll do but you never get around to doing,” one of Chickie’s pals tells him. But aside from one scene where he wakes up late for church, we never really get a sense of Chickie as a layabout or an unreliable dullard. Why does this matter? Because the film presents Chickie as having taken on this absurd challenge partly to show everybody that he isn’t useless and that he can, in fact, follow through on a promise. If the movie doesn’t care about its own protagonist’s motivations, what hope does the audience have? What are we even doing here, guy?

All that painfully expository dialogue probably looked great on the page to the agency readers and studio execs who skimmed through the script on its way to production, but at some point, somebody should probably have considered turning it into an actual movie. It’s not just the haphazard writing but the fact that Farrelly can’t seem to decide how to play any of it. A merchant mariner, Chickie shows up at the seafarers union office one afternoon and casually asks if any ships are departing for Vietnam, convinced that none will be. Sure enough, one is set to leave that evening. “But I doubt they need an oiler this late in the game,” he mutters, clearly hoping to be spared an actual trip to war-torn Southeast Asia. “Hey, you’re in luck!” Once in Saigon, Chickie realizes that “tourist” is an informal code among the military for “CIA,” so he rides that con for a while. This is the stuff of high-concept comedy — so easy, so nonchalant. Did it really happen this way? Who the hell knows? What matters is that it rings false onscreen, like an elaborate joke without a punch line.

As The Greatest Beer Run Ever proceeds, an idea does come into view, albeit foggily. One suspects that Farrelly wanted the film to start in one register and then move into another — a simplistic comic-surreal quest that slowly turns into a grim, complicated journey of disillusionment and self-discovery — so that the movie itself might, in a way, grow with Chickie. He will be transformed by what he sees in Vietnam, and the naïveté of the early scenes will be demolished as our hero inadvertently eases his way into hell. That is an intriguing structural concept, but the film loses the thread so early that it’s hard to appreciate the idea on any level beyond the theoretical. Because at some point someone has to commit to what’s happening onscreen to give the audience something to grasp onto, something to care about — an emotional engine, if you will.

Efron does come close, however. Chickie is a good part for him, and coming on the heels of this past May’s abysmal Firestarter , which the actor essentially walked through, The Greatest Beer Run Ever is welcome proof that he can run with the right material. Efron’s great power is his soulful imperturbability: That placid face of his can speak to ignorance and haziness, as well as bewilderment, while sometimes hinting at an inner vulnerability. So he does bring some dimension to the character, even as the picture fails to live up to his performance. And when nobody’s talking, The Greatest Beer Run Ever manages to muster some power. Late in the film, Chickie finds himself on a desolate road, wordlessly trying to befriend a young Vietnamese girl who looks at him in terror and pain. It’s a quietly eloquent moment of recognition and disappointment — the kind that reminds you of what much of the rest of the movie so sorely lacks.

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Review: In the brewmance ‘The Greatest Beer Run Ever,’ Zac Efron brings the boys a cold one

A young man offers beers to two military policemen.

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For his follow-up feature to the Oscar-winning 2018 film “Green Book,” director Peter Farrelly has turned to a genial true story from the Vietnam War. “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” isn’t your typical Vietnam film. Based on a wild, wildly improbable tale, it hews closer to comedy than gritty war drama — it’s Nam-com, if you will. But over the course of the film, it evolves from lark to dark as the protagonist learns the brutal reality of war during his harrowing journey delivering cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon to his pals.

Farrelly (known mostly for his comic collaborations with his brother Bobby), along with Pete Jones and Brian Hayes Currie, adapted the book “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” by John “Chick” Donohue and J.T. Molloy. Zac Efron stars as Chickie Donohue, an unmotivated good-time guy from Inwood, Manhattan, who just can’t stand that his buddies from the neighborhood keep getting killed in the war. Yet he’s also mad at the news media for showing only the negative and doesn’t understand why his sister keeps attending war protests. Efron’s version of Chickie is an easily swayed naif, which is how one thing leads to another.

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When his ardently patriotic local bartender, the Colonel (Bill Murray), expresses his desire to bring the boys a beer, Chickie announces he’s going to do it, despite everyone’s belief that he’ll blow it off like he does everything. But things seem strangely aligned to go Chickie’s way. He’s a merchant marine, and it just so happens that a ship full of ammo bound for Saigon is short a crew member. So he boards with a duffel full of PBR and a head full of … well, absolutely nothing. Chickie has no plan, but then again, things are lining up to make sure that he achieves his harebrained mission.

Through a combination of dumb luck, charm, naivete, street smarts and good old American friendliness — and the fact that everyone thinks he’s CIA — Chickie manages to scam his way onto military planes and choppers. Incredibly, he makes his way around the country to deliver beer to four of the boys from the ’hood and gets caught in the Tet Offensive while he’s at it. Although it may seem he’s having a Forrest Gump adventure, when it comes to these facts, at least, there’s no creative license taken. Some stories are just stranger than fiction.

The first half is stilted and smirky, with Farrelly’s filmmaking serviceable at best, some of the motivation very rushed. But as Chickie finds his footing, so does the film, falling in step with the young man as he realizes that this trip is much more than a dare. What starts out light and a bit silly takes on a growing poignance with each PBR cracked, each “see ya back in the neighborhood.” So too does Farrelly’s aesthetic evolve, moving from a brightly lighted, almost artificial-looking style, to a darker, grittier and more fluid approach as things prove to be more serious. Russell Crowe offers some gravitas as a war correspondent who takes Chickie under his wing for a bit.

The beer run turns into a transformative experience as Chickie takes in the chaos, violence and loss of war, but more important, as he sees the reality of government lies and propaganda firsthand. Though the messaging is a bit flat-footed, it’s nonetheless effective and clearly deeply felt, and it brings a sense of significance to this otherwise wacky real-life story, one that really does have to be seen to be believed.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

'The Greatest Beer Run Ever'

Rated: R, for language and some war violence Running time: 2 hours, 6 minutes Playing: Starts Sept. 30 in general release; also streaming on Apple TV+

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‘The Greatest Beer Run Ever’ Review: Peter Farrelly and Zac Efron Take on Vietnam

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. AppleTV+ releases the film in select theaters and on its streaming platform on Friday, September 30.

Chickie Donahue ( Zac Efron ) is already deep in his self-appointed wartime mission when someone finally calls it what it really is: “the dumbest thing I ever heard.” By then, the part-time merchant marine and full-time screw-up is already in the middle of Vietnam and its war. The next step is embracing the idiocy of what’s he done while coming out of the whole damn thing alive.

Peter Farrelly ‘s “ The Greatest Beer Run Ever ” is his first film since he won Best Picture for “Green Book,” a film embraced by audiences and maligned by critics. This one hits many of the same beats as that divisive feature, though with a lighter touch that strives more boldly to marry his comedic sensibilities and the reality of a painful history.

Like “Green Book,” “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” is a broad historical outing based on real people and real events, condensed down into an essence that can only be billed as “crowd-pleasing.” The trick this time: Farrelly seems far more aware of how he’s playing fast and loose with history to offer a zippy feature to a fractured world. Dare we say it: It works far better.

The ace up his sleeve is a never-better Efron. As one character tells Chickie late in the film, his heart is solid gold, but it’s his brain people need to worry about. Like many Americans in the late ’60s, Chickie doesn’t know exactly why America is at war, but he sure as hell knows he supports it and his many friends who have been carted off to Vietnam to, uhh, maybe fight the Commies or something? Meanwhile, his close-knit Inwood community keeps losing good boys — all of them “dying heroes” — and his sister Christine (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) is protesting the war around the neighborhood.

Down at Chickie’s local joint, a cozy pub owned and operated by The Colonel (an unrecognizable Bill Murray), he and his pals hit upon a wild idea: Wouldn’t it be great to show our boys we support them by showing up in Vietnam and giving them an ice-cold American beer as thanks? No one actually expects anyone to do it, except Chickie. After his own friends and family express their disbelief that knucklehead Chickie (of all people!) would execute any scheme that required a modicum of forethought, the New York native can’t take it anymore.

As he declares to the local dudes at the bar, he “could, would, and will” take on this insane mission. Well, as Hemingway so sagely put it, always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. Such is the theme of “The Greatest Beer Run Ever,” which speaks to its kicky title and Farrelly’s comedic bent before easing Chickie into hell and letting him sort it out for himself.

“The Greatest Beer Run Ever” is not a gritty war picture; it’s glossy and entertaining and often fun. Farrelly struggled to unpack racism in “Green Book,” but this time he’s got a story that requires both blind faith and nutty optimism. With a number of twinkly-eyed moments that hinge on crazy fate and “Forrest Gump” coincidence to spare, Chickie sets off for Vietnam. Farrelly, Brian Hayes Currie, and Pete Jones’ script condenses much of the real Donahue’s insane quest, cutting down a four-month “beer run” to four days, but the choice keeps things moving and obscuring hard truths with fast-paced movie magic.

Efron moves subtly from wide-eyed to shell-shocked as he meets local cop “Oklahoma” (a heartbreaking Kevin K. Tran); Lt. Habershaw, the military lackey who is convinced Chickie is CIA (a very funny Matt Cook); and a grizzled war reporter (who could only be played by Russell Crowe). Chickie bobs and weaves around the country, hopscotching across frontlines and cozy barracks, slowly realizing that he knows nothing about this war or about real life. An ice-cold PBR sounds nice, but all he’s doing is delivering lukewarm cheap beer to people doing the real work.

The journey leaves Efron’s Chickie filthy, exhausted, and fearing for his life, but “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” never relinquishes its glossy exterior. For some viewers, that distance between straight-up entertainment and the Tet Offensive may be a bridge too far. No one tries to call Chickie a hero, least of all Chickie, and while his mission might have been noble-ish (let’s call it noble-adjacent, but definitely reckless and unnecessary), it’s just a different way of looking at the war. When Chickie returns home — not a spoiler, how the hell else would this story be revealed? — he’s got nothing but bad news to deliver.

So did the beer help? Enough to make a shiny biopic and remind everyone that war is hell and no one should forget it. There’s not enough beer in the world for that.

“The Greatest Beer Run Ever” premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. AppleTV+ will release the film in select theaters and on its streaming platform on Friday, September 30.

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‘The Greatest Beer Run Ever’ Review: Zac Efron Goes to Vietnam to Give His Grunt Buddies a Beer in Peter Farrelly’s Disappointing Follow-Up to ‘Green Book’

Instead of two compelling characters, this true story gives us one lunkhead on a quixotic crusade.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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So tonight, when Toronto hosted the world premiere of “ The Greatest Beer Run Ever ,” the first movie Peter Farrelly has directed since “Green Book,” you can bet that thoughts of that award were lingering in the air. What I can report, though, is that whatever awards “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” does or doesn’t win in Toronto, the film is not going to pull a repeat of the “Green Book” juggernaut.

That’s because this time the movie doesn’t deliver. It’s directed with the same brand of buoyant mainstream craftsmanship, as well as expert lensing (by Sean Porter), that made “Green Book” go down easy. But that movie was powered by a pair of world-class performances, and whatever your opinion of its politics, it had a witty and deftly structured buddy-road-movie script. It all added up.

“The Greatest Beer Run Ever” lumbers and meanders, and not just because the structure isn’t there. What we’re seeing, on a human level, is only half-interesting and rather slipshod. Like “Green Book,” “Greatest Beer Run” is based on a true story, but what Peter Farrelly responded to in that story translates, this time, into a token “relevant” boomer nostalgia that hasn’t been fully thought through.

There’s a culture war going on, tearing families — and maybe the country – apart. Farrelly wants us to hear an echo of today’s culture war, but it doesn’t take long for that parallel to fade out of the movie. Because “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” has something more on its mind. Something momentous. Something morally and spiritually cleansing. Are you sitting down?

Chickie wants to bring a bunch of beers to his grunt buddies in Vietnam.

This does not strike us as a good idea. Unless, of course, “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” was a comedy made in the ’80s starring Chevy Chase, in which case it would be a very good idea. But the story the movie tells did actually happen: In 1967, Chickie Donahue really did head over to Vietnam in a Merchant Marine ship, landing in Saigon, and attempt to go in country with a bag full of beer. But that doesn’t mean what happened to him is compelling. “Greatest Beer Run” tells what is basically the story of a quixotic whim laced with a fair amount of stupidity. And the film, weirdly enough, even understands this.

It doesn’t take long for Chickie to get to ‘Nam (the Merchant Marine cruise lasts two months, but only a moment of screen time), and early on, after having hitchhiked north, there’s a scene in which he lands at the base camp of his buddy Rick Duggan (Jake Picking), a soldier who must scurry through a combat zone just to meet him. Rick walks in, and Chickie flashes him a big grin and holds up a couple of beers, with the expectation that Rick is going to be thrilled to see him. Instead, Rick is pissed off. He just came running through a hail of bullets, and he wants to know: What the hell is Chickie doing? He doesn’t belong there. Rick doesn’t need a beer, and the whole thing sounds a little insane. We listen to this rant and think, “Okay, we weren’t nuts for feeling like this was a dumb idea.” But Chickie is obstinate in his cockeyed optimism, even when he’s being shot at in a foxhole with no weapon. He wants to see his friends! Including, hopefully, Tommy (Will Hochman), who has gone missing in action, but who Chickie is all but certain is going to show up. Doesn’t he want a beer?

Since Farrelly is too good a filmmaker to want to cut corners, much of “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” — are you picking up on the irony of the title? — is devoted to the logistics of how Chickie gets around Vietnam. Part of it is a running joke that sounds like it belongs in that Chevy Chase movie: Since Chickie has no military credentials, an officer assumes he’s with the CIA, and Chickie’s denial of that just plays as a conformation. And he keeps hitting that note. He gets whisked through ‘Nam — in planes, on choppers, in jeeps — based on the perception that he’s a powerful operative who has to be catered to.

Zac Efron is an actor I’ve come to admire, but in this movie he’s forced to play a guy we have to work to root for. It’s not that Efron is less than likable, but he plays Chickie with an easygoing myopic mindlessness that’s not the sort of thing that should be holding down the center of a movie. And since the film is episodic in a galumphing way, we have more than enough time to notice several howlers that are baked into it. Why, for instance, do the characters, who are all from New York, speak in Boston accents? I’m not kidding. The whole art of accent specificity has been so lost that to prepare for their roles, it sounds like the entire cast just went and studied a bunch of Ben Affleck movies.

Howler number two: Chickie keeps giving away the cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon he has brought along in his bag. He gives them out in bunks, he hands them out on the road, he’s like the Santa Claus of brewskie. But after a while, all I could think was: How many beers does he have in that goddamn duffel bag? Did he borrow the bag from Mary Poppins? Beyond that, the film makes an egregious mistake in tone when Chickie is riding in a chopper, watching a Viet Cong soldier get interrogated (by an actual CIA operative), and the soldier gets tossed out of the chopper, plunging to his death…and before we can even react, the movie is playing “Cherish,” by the Association, on the soundtrack. Is this supposed to be ironic? Because it feels like the definition of tone-deaf.

If Chickie the beer whisperer isn’t really connecting with his friends in ‘Nam, then what is “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” about? I have bad news on that score: It’s about Chickie, who was gung-ho on the war, learning that Vietnam is the mess the protesters said it was, that LBJ and Gen. Westermoreland (who we see on TV) are lying, and that the whole system is lying. At a bar in Saigon, Chickie meets a handful of American journalists, notably a Look magazine correspondent played by Russell Crowe in a voice of deepest deep. They all cue him to “the public relations war,” and to how the U.S. government is using it to hide the truth about Vietnam. But Chickie has to see it for himself. And out in the combat zones, he does. As he puts it late in the film, he learns that unlike the chaos and slaughter of WWII, this is bad chaos and slaughter. So now he’s an expert! Unfortunately, that means “The Greatest Been Run Ever is really a lesson — in America’s lost innocence, and in why the war in Vietnam was a moral catastrophe — that none of us needs to learn.

Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival, Sept. 13, 2022. MPA rating: R. Running time: 126 MIN.

Production: An Apple TV+ release of an Apple Original Films, Skydance Media, Living Films production. Producers: David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Andrew Muscato, Jake Myers.
Crew: Director: Peter Farrelly. Screenplay: Peter Farrelly, Brian Currie, Pete Jones. Camera: Sean Porter. Editor: Patrick J, Don Vito. Music: Dave Palmer.
With: Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, Bill Murray, Kyle Allen, Jake Picking, Will Ropp, Archie Renaux, Christopher Reed Brown, Joe Adler, Kristin Carey, Paul Adelstein.

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The Greatest Beer Run Ever Review

Zac efron channels dumb and dumber in a funny but empty and manipulative war drama..

This is an advanced review out of the Toronto International Film Festival, where The Greatest Beer Run Ever made its world premiere. It will debut in select theaters and on Apple TV+ on Sept. 30, 2022.

Peter Farrelly follows up Green Book with the funny, rather simplistic, and ultimately forgettable The Greatest Beer Run Ever. Zac Efron does his best to give the film both a wacky SpongeBob sense of humor and a grounded, emotional anchor, but even his best efforts can't save The Greatest Beer Run Ever from its own lazy plot and cinematography, or its questionable themes and ideals. Farrelly once again pulls from a dark chapter in American history and uses it to deliver a googly-eyed feel-good movie about how everything can be better if we could just find common ground. The result is grossly manipulative and leaves an aftertaste about as good as the warm beer the main character is delivering.

Farrelly knows how to make movies about idiots. From Dumb and Dumber to Me, Myself & Irene , he crafts lovable yet absolutely moronic characters you can't help but root for. Then he made Green Book, an attempt to mix his kind of dumb humor with prestige Oscar-bait drama that aspired to more than just laughs, and despite a horrible script, it went on to win Best Picture. Now, the director returns with yet another movie that is supposedly about big, timely ideas, but is just oversimplifying a decades-old conflict and not really saying anything that's not been said in the past 50 years while hailing itself as revolutionary.

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It focuses on John "Chickie" Donohue (Efron), an aimless, lazy freeloader who spends his days avoiding paying his bar tab and talking about goals he'll probably never accomplish — like becoming a cop or graduating high school. Though he doesn't seem to care much about current news, he takes great offense to anyone badmouthing the war in Vietnam or the soldiers dying there. And yet, even as eight of the neighborhood kids have already died overseas, Chickie and his friends just spend their nights drinking merrily like they always do without a care in the world.

But when the WWII veteran bar owner (played by Bill Murray) complains about the news showing the horrors of Vietnam and how the kids overseas just need a bit of comfort from home, Chickie gets an idea. He finally has a way to make a contribution to the war effort… by traveling to Vietnam, walking into the front lines, and delivering beer to the kids from the neighborhood.

What's the best Zac Efron movie?

Without a doubt, the reason to see this movie is to experience Efron playing an absolute idiot. Thankfully, unlike Green Book, the script — co-written by Farrelly, Brian Currie, and Pete Jones, based on a book by Joanna Molloy and the real Chickie — makes Chickie the butt of the joke rather than have him laugh at someone else's expense. He’s compelling to watch because he is a lovable fool. We're talking Dumb and Dumber levels of idiot – SpongeBob Squarepants levels of stupid – the type of guy who cannot even fathom that American beer might not be impossible to find in Vietnam. And like the yellow, squared fry cook, Efron's Chickie is not just stupid; he’s a charming optimist. He is a character who should be dead the second he steps foot in Vietnam, but as one soldier later notes, some people are just too stupid to die.

The film’s problems, however, start right at the beginning, where it frames Chickie's quest as noble and heroic when in reality, it’s all incredibly selfish and self-centered. Farrelly seems to believe the gesture is enough to heal the country, and even the score is rousing and inspirational as Chickie makes the trip across Vietnam to meet his buddies. But whenever one of his friends tells him to go home and that his actions are no joke, the movie dismisses that as them simply being too afraid to appreciate the gesture.

Despite the script's best efforts to show Chickie's loss of innocence as he discovers that Vietnam may not be a valiant effort, but actual hell, it is all superficial and ridden with clichés, as well as plain and unimaginative visuals. The tone is that of triumph, of a film that thinks it’s saying something new while only reaching the conclusion of "we were wrong and Vietnam went pretty badly." Unsurprisingly, the framing is completely on the American public's view of the war – about the public relations war going on – without a single thought given to the effect of the war in Vietnam itself.

There is a lot of talk about the soldiers going through hell and the effects of guerilla warfare on morale, but zero interest in exploring the damage this invading force is having on the country. At most, The Greatest Beer Run Ever frames the Vietnamese as ungrateful that the American troops are present, with characters mentioning that civilians don't want them there, but there is no mention of the death and suffering carried out by the American troops. Of course, there are Vietnamese characters – two to be precise – but the only one with a hint of importance to the plot and the barest of characterization is a comic relief cop whose purpose is … surprise! To make Chickie a better person.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever achieves neither the healing it aims to accomplish, nor the Oscar-bait drama it envisions, nor even the broader return to comedy for Farrelly that he seems to be hinting at.

Peter Farrelly's follow-up to Green Book is a war drama with some solid laughs and a great Zac Efron performance, but a manipulative script with ugly optics and boring visuals that never achieve the prestige it clearly wants.

More Reviews by Rafael Motamayor

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DVD & Streaming

The Greatest Beer Run Ever

Comedy , War

Content Caution

In Theaters

Zac Efron as Chickie Donohue; Russell Crowe as Coates; Bill Murray as The Colonel; Kyle Allen as Bobby Pappas; Jake Picking as Rick Duggan

Home Release Date

September 30, 2022
Peter Farrelly

Distributor

Movie review.

Nobody would ever call Chickie Donahue a heavy thinker.

Heavy drinker is a title that fits him ever so much better. But when he came up with his latest plan, he was no more than five beers into his regular routine at the local bar—which for Chickie is practically stone-cold sober.

While sitting, drinking and discussing the local guys who are dying over in Vietnam during the spring of ’67, Chickie declares that he’s gonna show his buds in uniform a little love. He is a Merchant Mariner after all. He’ll just take a few cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and visit some of the guys on the front lines with a brewski in hand. It’ll be easy.

Of course, by the next morning, the idea of hopping a steamer to Vietnam seems kinda silly. But by then word had gotten around that Chickie Donahue was gonna go over there and show those guys what they’re fightin’ for. And family members of friends start handing him things to take with him.

By now, Chickie is kinda wishing he’d just kept his mouth shut. But then a couple of the guys come up to calm him down. It’s not like anybody expects him to go, they tell him. I mean, everybody knows he never follows through on anything .

That sneering assessment of his character is just enough to tip the scale.

Next thing you know Chickie is lying his face off to get three days leave in Saigon. He’d made it there via a ship that was transporting ammo, carrying a duffle bag full of PBR. And he’s determined to track down his friends.

Now you might think that it would be a little tough for a civilian to find his way around a country full of flying bullets and dropping bombs. But somehow the military brass is quick to assume that an undocumented “tourist” walking by himself through a war zone is probably none other than, shh , CIA.

And who’s Chickie to tell them they’re wrong? This three-day beer run might just work out.

I mean what’s a little war between old bar-hopping friends anyway?

Positive Elements

Chickie may not be thinking as clearly as he should, but initially his intentions are good. He really does want to take a message of support to his friends. And he really does believe that, like past wars, the American efforts in Vietnam are upright and freedom-focused. (It’s only with time that he realizes that everything that they hear back home isn’t exactly accurate.)

Despite his lack of understanding of the severity of war, many people go out of their way to help Chickie survive. Ultimately Chickie fesses up and apologizes for misleading people and unthinkingly encouraging a friend to join the war effort. He’s forgiven by others.

Spiritual Elements

Chickie’s family is Catholic and they encourage him to go to mass. But he only slips into the church long enough to give the impression that he was there for the service. A news photographer in a Saigon bar orders another cocktail, saying, “One more time for Jesus.”

During explosive combat in the streets, Chickie blames himself for things going wrong, stating that “God always made me pay” for any foolish mistake—from stealing candy to having sex. The reporter he’s talking to doubts that bringing beer to men in the war would raise God’s ire.

Sexual Content

Chickie says that the first time he ever had sex he came down with a venereal disease.

Violent Content

The warfare raging around Chickie intensifies as his beer-delivery quest unfolds. At first, Chickie’s just running from sniper fire. Then we see people hit with bullets and grenade shrapnel. Planes drop napalm on fields and mountainsides. We see a herd of elephants that is scarred by the carnage. Explosions abound and people run amid ricocheting gun fire and shoot outs. A man is battered and bloodied by an interrogator and then thrown head-first out of a helicopter to fall to the forest floor below.

When a battle breaks out in Saigon, Chickie and a reporter friend run for cover. Buildings get hit by explosive RPGs. A Jeep blows up, sending men flying. One guy staggers forward from the blast, his arm torn off and bleeding at the shoulder. We see several dead and bloodied people lying in the streets, including children.

Back home, people talk about friends who have died in the war or gone MIA. A protest erupts into a brawl, and someone is punched in the face and knocked out cold.

Crude or Profane Language

Two f-words and some 30 s-words are joined by about15 uses of “a–” and “a–hole” and several uses each of “d–n,” “b–tard” and “h—.”

God’s and Jesus’ names are both misused a total of 30 times (with the former being combined with “d–n” seven times). There are several crude references made to male and female genitals.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Since this is all about a long-distance beer run with a seemingly bottomless bag of canned beer, there is constant drinking in the mix. We see people chugging back beers, glasses of Scotch and cocktails in bars, fox holes and on military bases. Some get a bit tipsy. One guy puffs on a marijuana joint. And a variety of different people smoke cigarettes throughout.

Other Negative Elements

Several people, jaded by the harshness and agonies of war, speak of their distrust of government officials. Several times, lies and deception are purposely disseminated through newscasts and public statements.

“A little less drinking. A little more thinking!” declares the protagonist of The Greatest Beer Run Ever .

That’s the clearest message this antiwar comedy has in its Pabst Blue Ribbon-stuffed duffle. And let’s face it, along with this pic’s second encouragement to not instantly swallow everything you hear in the news, that’s probably a sentiment that many ought to take to heart.

That said, this “based on a true story” movie isn’t necessarily the best investment of your lesson-learning time. It tiptoes alternately between brainless choices, ever-flowing profanity and bloody war. And drinking, too, of course.

Chickie, our beer-swilling hero, may espouse good reasons to be less inebriated. But his movie isn’t exactly intoxicating or all that thoughtful.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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‘The Greatest Beer Run Ever’: Zac Efron takes Pabst to Vietnam, brings home heavy-handed messages

Wartime story, while well-intentioned, just feels forced..

Chickie (Zac Efron) travels from Manhattan to Vietnam in 1967 to deliver Pabst Blue Ribbon to his buddies in “The Greatest Beer Run Ever.”

When you see Zac Efron’s name connected to a movie called “The Greatest Beer Run Ever,” you might well think this is going to be another Bro Comedy in the vein of the “Neighbors” films or “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates,” but this is actually a Vietnam movie based on a strange and true story. And while the movie-star-handsome Efron again proves to be a reliable actor capable of handling comedy and drama within the same role, this plays out like a greatest-hits collection of scenes from better Vietnam movies, including “Casualties of War,” “Good Morning, Vietnam” and “The Deer Hunter.”

The intentions and performances are irrefutably sincere and noble. The execution almost always feels a little bit forced and a little bit false.

Director Peter Farrelly’s first film since the Academy Award-winning “Green Book” has a number of surface similarities to that picture, in that it’s a period-piece story inspired by true events, focusing on a conservative, working-class New York lunk who embarks on a journey into new territory and has his eyes opened to social injustice. Zac Efron’s Chickie Donahue is a Merchant Marine who lives in the blue-collar Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood in 1967, spending his nights pounding drinks at Doc Fiddler’s, the local pub run by the Colonel (Bill Murray), who still sports a flat-top from his fighting days in World War II and somberly intones that every one of the local lads fighting in Vietnam is a damn hero, and the media should stop showing the horrors of war on the TV every night.

Chickie’s sister Christine (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) has joined up with the local protesters gathering the park and chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today!” but Chickie’s views align with the Colonel’s: This is a just war worth fighting, and his buddies from the neighborhood are risking their lives in a noble effort to stop the spread of Communism. Fueled by a few too many drinks one night, Chickie pledges to take a duffel bag filled with cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and deliver beers to a bunch of the guys in Vietnam, as a way of showing support.

Wait, what? It’s just about the dumbest idea anyone’s ever heard of — a point that’s made throughout the movie — but the real-life Chickie actually did undertake this seemingly suicidal mission (though “The Greatest Beer Run” condenses a four-month odyssey into less than a week). With director Farrelly working in needle drops to pop/rock tunes such as the Jefferson Airplane’s “Today,” the Hombres’ “Let It All Hang Out” and The Association’s “Cherish” (which is to this movie what “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” was to “The Deer Hunter”), Chickie hitches a ride on a cargo ship, arrives in Saigon and starts asking around for his buddies, who are stationed in various locales miles apart. That’s about the extent of Chickie’s plan, but he keeps on stumbling into dumb luck, in large part because he’s mistaken for a CIA operative, and his denials only make it seem more likely he’s a spook.

One of the problems with “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” is Chickie’s buddies are virtually indistinguishable. They’re all good guys (who seem to speak with Boston accents, even though they’re from New York) who are initially shocked and more than a little ticked off that Chickie has just shown up unannounced, putting himself and them at risk — but they eventually enjoy a beer or two with their old pal, give him a hug and tell him to say hello to everyone back home. (Chickie’s duffel bag holds a seemingly endless supply of beers. Not since Jesus fed the multitudes with only a few loaves and fishes …)

Russell Crowe is magnificent as a war correspondent sharing wisdom with Chickie.

“Beer Run” introduces a number of stock characters, including a friendly local police officer (Kevin K. Tran) Chickie dubs “Oklahoma” because that’s the officer’s favorite movie; a clueless military bureaucrat (Matt Cook) who keeps helping out Chickie in the hopes Chickie will put in a good word for him with the CIA, and a grizzled war correspondent (Russell Crowe), who takes a liking to Chickie and doles out valuable lessons, e.g., war is hell, and the most important battle of all is on the public relations front. (Crowe is magnificent in a too-small role.) By the time Chickie is ready to hand out the last, what must be very warm beer, he’s not so sure this war is a good idea after all. Surprise! To no one.

“The Greatest Beer Run” has some impressively staged battle sequences, fine performances from Efron and the supporting cast, a handful of darkly funny moments and a few decent dramatic punches. Time and again, though, the messages are pounded home in heavy-handed fashion — never more so than when Chickie returns home, out of beer but filled with new wisdom.

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The greatest beer run ever, common sense media reviewers.

Drinking, violence, few laughs in fact-based Vietnam story.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Very earnestly supports the troops and those who s

Chickie's plan isn't the most brilliant or memorab

Revolves almost entirely around White men. Some ch

Guns and shooting on battlefields. Characters are

Brief sexual reference.

Frequent use of "f--k," "s--t," "bulls--t," "dumbs

Pabst Blue Ribbon is the beer of choice: It's show

Alcohol and drinking are part of the story; charac

Positive Messages

Very earnestly supports the troops and those who serve while also asserting that war is bad. Occasionally raises questions about how war should be depicted in the media -- i.e., not at all, sugarcoated, or brutal and real. Raises questions about reasons for war, whether to trust authority figures.

Positive Role Models

Chickie's plan isn't the most brilliant or memorable -- or even useful -- thing that ever happened, but he certainly accomplishes what he sets out to do, and it's ultimately a selfless act that's designed to lift the spirits of others.

Diverse Representations

Revolves almost entirely around White men. Some characters of color appear in small or background roles. The main character's sister is a passionate woman with agency. The few other female characters are mainly traditional mothers.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Guns and shooting on battlefields. Characters are shot at. Explosions. Person shoved out of helicopter falls to their death. Characters' arm blown off in explosion. Bloody wounds. Death is discussed in a real-world way. Brief punching, fighting. Parent slaps child. Arguing.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent use of "f--k," "s--t," "bulls--t," "dumbs--t," "bats--t," "p---y," "t-ts," "twat," "a--hole," "son of a bitch," "goddamn," "ass," "bastard," "hell," "for God's sake," "Christ's sake," "scumbags," "balls." "Jesus" and "Christ" used as exclamations.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Pabst Blue Ribbon is the beer of choice: It's shown throughout the movie, labels clearly visible. It's also prominently seen in the advertising materials.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Alcohol and drinking are part of the story; characters regularly hang out in bars and drink. Drinking is portrayed as fun, with no consequences. Characters drink mostly beer, but also some whiskey. Occasional cigarette smoking. Character smokes pot in background.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a dramedy based on the true story of Merchant Marine Chickie Donohue ( Zac Efron ), who, in 1967, traveled to Vietnam to bring beer to his military buddies. It means well, but it's a bit heavy-handed. Expect to see war violence, with guns and shooting, explosions, bloody wounds, a severed arm, a man thrown to his death from a helicopter, punching, fighting, slapping, etc. Death is discussed. Language is strong and frequent, with uses of "f--k," "s--t," "p---y," "bitch," and more, and there's brief sex-related dialogue. Alcohol and drinking are prevalent; drinking is shown to be fun and relaxing, with no consequences shown or discussed. Pabst Blue Ribbon is the beer of choice, and its label and logo are seen throughout. Characters also smoke cigarettes and, briefly, pot. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

Parents say (4)
Kids say (2)

Based on 4 parent reviews

They are not forgotten!

What's the story.

In THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER, it's 1967 in New York City, and Merchant Marine Chickie Donohue ( Zac Efron ) and his friends are dismayed at how many of their friends have been killed in Vietnam. Chickie's sister, Christine ( Ruby Ashbourne Serkis ), has been participating in anti-war protests, but Chickie feels that this disrespects the troops. While drinking in his favorite bar, which is manned by The Colonel ( Bill Murray ), Chickie concocts a plan to board the next ship bound for Vietnam and bring all of his still-living military buddies a beer. Once there, with dumb luck, persistence, and help from a crusty reporter named Coates ( Russell Crowe ), Chickie tries to pull off his wild idea. But actually being in a war zone opens his eyes, too.

Is It Any Good?

This dramedy could have been much funnier, but it falls back on wobbly writing and on overly sincere, one-note sermons about war and service. "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard of," one character says of Chickie's plan in The Greatest Beer Run Ever , but, as directed by comedy veteran Peter Farrelly , the movie somehow fails to capture that tone. Perhaps it cares too much, since it returns again and again to the noble reason for Chickie's journey, which is supporting the troops and "buying those boys a beer." If the movie had been a little more carefree, a little more anarchic, perhaps it might have generated some laughs. ( Bill Murray 's character in Stripes wouldn't even recognize his character here.)

Perhaps the lead role was a bit much for Efron. His acting chops have marginally improved since his early days, and he can now convincingly play a dramatic scene, but he maybe doesn't quite have the comic timing that a number of other actors would have provided. Or perhaps Farrelly was afraid of offending people by showing any kind of portrayal of the military that could be seen as negative, while still wanting to assert that "war is hell." That could be why the movie seems so pleasant, without being really engaging. Ultimately, while it's hard to hate The Greatest Beer Run Ever , it's just more flat than it is sudsy.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Greatest Beer Run Ever 's violence. How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How are alcohol and drinking depicted? Are they glamorized? Are there consequences? Why is that important?

Is it important for the media to show the truth of war, or should people be protected from it?

Do you consider Chickie a role model ? Is this a selfless act? What does he ultimately achieve?

Movie Details

In theaters : September 23, 2022
On DVD or streaming : September 30, 2022
Cast : Zac Efron , Russell Crowe , Bill Murray
Director : Peter Farrelly
Studio : Apple TV+
Genre : Drama
Run time : 127 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language and some war violence
Last updated : February 17, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

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For the Love of Beer and His Buddies

“The Greatest Beer Run Ever” tells the story of Chickie Donohue’s unlikely but true adventure bringing suds from New York to his military pals in 1967 Vietnam.

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By Corey Kilgannon

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Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.

Chickie Donohue, 81, has been telling saloon stories since his teens, but there’s one he no longer has to tell.

It is about his preposterously unlikely trip to Vietnam in 1967 to bring his soldier friends a beer and a hug of support from their home neighborhood of Inwood in Upper Manhattan.

The soldiers, all stationed with different units, were gobsmacked to see their neighborhood buddy in well-worn dungarees and a checked shirt suddenly show up in foxholes and tent barracks and hand them a warm one from his duffel bag.

Over decades, it became a widely known, and widely disbelieved, tale in Inwood saloons and among Donohue’s fellow sandhogs, the urban miners who dig train and water tunnels deep in the city’s bedrock.

But now, Donohue is as amazed as anyone to see his story go from New York’s gritty bars and muddy tunnels to the big screen.

It has turned into “ The Greatest Beer Run Ever, ” an adventure-comedy directed by Peter Farrelly and starring Zac Efron as Donohue. It opened in theaters on Sept. 23 and will reach Apple TV+ on Sept. 30.

During his four months in Vietnam, Donohue visited four friends. All survived harrowing combat tours to return home. They are all still alive and meet for dinner regularly in New York.

When the film premiered this month at the Toronto International Film Festival , the producers flew them up, all expenses paid. It was a far cry from rations in muddy foxholes. There were luxury hotel rooms, $250 daily food stipends, a red carpet and a screening where the boys earned a standing ovation.

On a recent weekday, a day after flying home, Donohue slapped a $100 bill on the bar at the Tubby Hook Tavern in Inwood, his buddy Rick Duggan, 74, sitting beside him.

The owner, Niall Henry, clapped Donohue on the shoulder and said, “I mean, you’re a good-looking guy, Chickie, but come on — Zac Efron? Give me a break.”

“I had never heard of him,” Donohue said. “But my granddaughter told me he’s this, he’s that — so he passed the smell test for the family.”

Donohue, whose given name is John, grew up in Inwood when it was an Irish American enclave dense with bars. He ran errands for the old-timers in the Democratic clubs and bookie joints. He said that by late 1967, he knew more than 20 young men from the neighborhood who had died in the Vietnam War.

So one night at Doc Fiddler’s saloon in Inwood, when a patriotic bartender nicknamed the Colonel (played in the film by Bill Murray) blasted antiwar demonstrators and blurted out that someone ought to bring a beer to the local boys fighting over there, Donohue shocked his fellow patrons by volunteering.

At 26, he was a Marine Corps veteran (stationed in Japan and elsewhere) and working as a merchant seaman. He signed on with a ship transporting ammunition from New York to Vietnam and brought a duffel bag full of American beer and whatever information he could find on the whereabouts of a half-dozen soldier friends.

He essentially sneaked around the country to find his buddies’ units, navigating through restricted areas and military officialdom, and hitching rides on Jeeps and planes.

“The story went all through the neighborhood, but some people sure had their doubts,” said Duggan, a retired New York City police lieutenant who grew up in the same Inwood apartment building as Donohue.

Duggan showed bar patrons images of Donohue eating rations with his ambush patrol unit, photos he took with the Kodak Instamatic camera his mother sent him in Vietnam.

Donohue said that when photos like these were on hand, over the years, they helped him back up his far-fetched story and “I didn’t have to buy a beer for a long time in Inwood.”

“But obviously I never dreamed it’d be a movie.”

How the beer run story went from Inwood bars to the big screen is itself another dizzying Chickie tale. As Andrew Muscato, one of the film’s producers, put it, “Making the film was almost as unlikely as the beer run itself” and required “the same kind of hubris and naïveté it takes to bring beer into a war zone.”

Donohue said the story began with the New York Daily News strike of 1990 when the owners were intent on putting out a “scab paper” despite a labor walkout. He said he thwarted management by getting their rail shipment of Canadian newsprint diverted to the Dakotas, with help from his union allies.

Anyway, during the strike, Donohue and his beer run story drew the attention of a News reporter, Joanna Molloy, who eventually collaborated with him on a 2017 book, also titled “The Greatest Beer Run Ever.”

While writing the book, she met Muscato, a documentary filmmaker looking for a project. They arranged to meet Donohue and the four Vietnam buddies at a bar to hear the definitive beer run story. The buddies brought their pictures and Donohue brought the stamped passport issued from the American Embassy in Saigon.

Muscato secured financing from Pabst Blue Ribbon to make a short documentary called, you guessed it, “The Greatest Beer Run Ever,” which became widely viewed on Pabst’s YouTube channel.

Muscato said his goal was to document the trip, “or else it would have remained this fantastical barroom tale.”

The short ran only 13 minutes, but it solidified the story’s credibility and caught the attention of executives at the production company Skydance, which in 2017 decided to make the film along with Muscato.

Muscato’s short also caught Farrelly’s attention while he was making “Green Book,” the 2018 drama that would go on to win best picture, and he was hooked right away.

“I was a minute in, and I was like, ‘You’re kidding me,’” he said in a phone interview.

“The concept, on the face of it, is ridiculous: a guy brings beer to his friends in the Vietnam War, that’s ludicrous,” said Farrelly, who signed on as director.

Early on, he asked Donohue how familiar he was with the rich genre of Vietnam films.

Just one, Donohue replied sincerely: “Forrest Gump.”

Muscato said that Efron got his hands on the script and quickly approached Skydance hoping to play Donohue. (Efron was not available to comment for this article.)

This was quite a hoot to Donohue’s friends and family, a hunk like Efron playing a man who had never placed much stock in appearances, especially when laboring underground or running the locker room trailer at a job site known as the “hog house,” where sandhogs shower and launder their mining clothes once back above ground.

A first-timer on a movie set, Donohue watched Efron and was initially confused about why filming involved so many takes.

“In the beginning I wasn’t impressed,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘Jeez, doesn’t the kid listen?’ I’ve had a lot of jobs and if I had to be told to do something over and over, I would have been fired immediately.”

Donohue then saw that Efron was using those takes to hone his portrayal.

“He asked me, ‘Did you do this or that?’ He wanted my help,” Donohue said. “It felt good that he wanted my participation.”

“I’m no judge of great acting but I think he really nailed me,” he said. “Watching him playing me, I felt the same emotion that I felt 50-something years ago.”

Audio produced by Parin Behrooz .

Corey Kilgannon is a Metro reporter covering news and human interest stories. He was also part of the team that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. More about Corey Kilgannon

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Movie Review – The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022)

September 24, 2022 by Robert Kojder

The Greatest Beer Run Ever , 2022.

Directed by Peter Farrelly. Starring Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, Kyle Allen, Bill Murray, Jake Picking, Will Ropp, Archie Renaux, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, Will Hochman, Christopher Reed Brown, Joe Adler, MacGregor Arney, Hal Cumpston, Kristin Carey, Paul Adelstein, Matt Cook, Shirleyann Kaladjian, Omari K. Chancellor, Brian Jarvis, Kelvin Delgado, James Fahselt, Mike Hatton, and Kevin Tran.

A man’s story of leaving New York in 1967 to bring beer to his childhood buddies in the Army while they are fighting in Vietnam.

We have all known someone like John “Chickie” Donohue (Zac Efron), the directionless and content twentysomething functioning alcoholic at the center of The Greatest Beer Run Ever (another true story from Oscar-winner Peter Farrelly’s Green Book follow-up, once again co-written with Brian Hayes Currie, this time bringing Pete Jones into the mix). Whenever not working abroad on ships, Chickie stays with his parents while drinking every night with his buddies (most of whom exist for comedic relief), hearing stories from the pro-war, America-first bartender dubbed The Colonel for his time serving in World War II (played by Bill Murray) justifying the conflict in Vietnam.

Growing up in a jingoistic New York neighborhood, America-first and the notion that the country can do no wrong is baked into Chickie’s mind. Even in a complicated conflict such as the Vietnam War, that’s far less black-and-white, he’s quick to shut down opposing viewpoints from his protesting sister Christine (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) and dismisses the media’s negative reporting as one-sided and demoralizing for everyone back home. In other words, it’s truthful and hits too close to home, especially for those that can’t handle seeing an uglier side of America.

Chickie is more or less involved with a rowdy and immature group that perceives war as exciting, logical, honorable, and a grand ol’ time (and to be clear, it is honorable to serve one’s country). This amusingly contrasts with the Colonel’s opinion that the horrors of war should be kept off television screens, dismantling that propaganda narrative. Nevertheless, if the TV screens aren’t enough to convince an overly patriotic dope like Chickie that a war zone is a dangerous, psychologically destabilizing place, maybe putting himself in the line of fire will serve as a wake-up call.

That doesn’t mean Chickie is going to enlist (although he has performed some noncombat duties); no, while several beers deep, he comes up with the pointlessly stupid idea to do a beer run for the neighborhood soldiers still in the thick of it, many of which are his friends and some of which have already died. It’s his way of counteracting the negative publicity and raising morale.

The beer run is misguided and dumb but does come from the heart. Loved ones of young soldiers flock to Chickie with encouragement and items to deliver, suggesting that this reckless endangerment goes beyond the alcohol and is a sincere, noble gesture. There’s also word that Chickie’s best friend Tommy (Will Hochman) is MIA. Awkwardly constructed flashbacks (they do nothing to enrich this emotional friendship bond) reveal that Chickie is responsible for Tommy enlisting, so there’s also some guilt settling in, which could be his true purpose for making the trip.

Through some good fortune, Chickie finds a job aboard a vessel headed to Saigon, which comes to serve as his hub nearest the combat where his friends are fighting. While there, he encounters several war correspondents covering the situation, including Russell Crowe’s photographer Coates who tries to break through that publishing the harsh truth is the real way to support the troops. Naturally, the stubbornly narrow-minded Chickie doesn’t want to hear any of that, forging ahead to convince anyone willing to bring him closer to the peril.

Not even civilians, let alone press, are granted access there, but that’s okay since Chickie accidentally lucks his way into coming across as an undercover CIA agent, given clearance to go anywhere. It’s a running joke that, regardless of whether it happened in real life, is presented here with too much of a jokey flair, especially since real CIA agents are torturing Vietnamese civilians.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever is meant to break Chickie’s blind American loyalty down bit by bit, but it’s either too syrupy, emotionally manipulative (there’s a scene involving a Saigon traffic director that is unbelievably corny), or lightweight to tackle any of these conventional themes properly. Even when the film does inevitably take a graphically violent turn, Zac Efron doesn’t exactly excel at convincingly reacting to these horrors. If anything, it proves that Peter Farrelly’s tone is a confused disaster.

There’s also a sensible case to be made that a movie called The Greatest Beer Run Ever deserves a breezy and funny touch (and there is a terrific gag involving elephant dung). But that, too, is called into question, considering most of Chickie’s friends aren’t enthused to see him and certainly don’t want any beers, especially when his every brash decision further endangers them (who the hell can blame them). Then there are subplots such as the CIA looking to capture Chickie that are unceremoniously dropped.

Zac Efron is an underrated actor with the necessary goofball charm and dramatic chops to make the broad strokes of the character’s journey believable, but The Greatest Beer Run Ever is drunk in execution. It’s a series of sequences where Peter Farrelly calls for unity between family members, citizens and press, and ethnicities which are worthwhile but bland and schmaltzy. It’s as satisfying as it probably was to receive a warm, nasty beer from a well-meaning idiot trying to survive the front lines of a war.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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The Greatest Beer Run Ever Review

30 Sep 2022

The Greatest Beer Run Ever

“Dumbest thing I ever heard,” is how one character describes the big plan behind The Greatest Beer Run Ever . It seems appropriate that the filmmaker behind it all is something of an expert in the dumb field: Peter Farrelly , the co-director of Dumb And Dumber , among other goofy, gross-out ’90s comedies. But this is late-period Farrelly. Like his Oscar-winning 2018 dramedy Green Book , we find the filmmaker retaining some level of humour, but trousering the dick jokes in favour of a real-life tale and more serious subject matter.

It’s certainly a peach of a true story. Merchant sailor Chickie ( Zac Efron ) is not quite as dumb as Jim Carrey’s Lloyd or Jeff Daniels’ Harry, but he’s not far off: a hothead who starts fights at peace rallies, with a heart in the right place but a head largely full of mush. It doesn’t seem out of character, then, that he might embark on a deeply ill-advised mission — spurred on by Bill Murray ’s thick-accented barman — to hitch a ride on an ammo ship and deliver some cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon to his buddies serving in the military.

The responses to this straightforwardly stupid idea range from incredulity to amazement to a polite explanation that beer is actually already widely available in Vietnam. But Efron sells it nicely, well-cast as a likeable lughead and skilled at summoning an assortment of gormless expressions. Driven only by a black-and-white view of the world and a (frat)boyish optimism, he is, as one character describes him, “too dumb to get killed”.

Enjoyable company for a couple of hours, warmly presented and confidently shot.

This is a war film in which the protagonist is a hapless observer rather than active participant, so it takes on a strange tone — like Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit , constantly in danger of trivialising something deadly serious. Chickie has a thoughtless approach to the war, a stance that softens when he sees the ugly truths, but his limited perspective somewhat limits the scope of the filmmaking. “This isn’t a war — it’s a massacre!” is Chickie’s biggest — and most unoriginal — revelation.

Despite some hard truths served up by Russell Crowe ’s photojournalist, the film offers few fresh ideas that a thousand ’Nam movies haven’t already provided. The script, co-written by Farrelly, Brian Currie and Pete Jones, seems to share the character’s lack of curiosity about the causes or complexities of the war, except to make the blunt point that there are no good guys or bad guys. And like many American films set during this war, it relegates the Vietnamese point of view to tiny supporting roles.

If the film struggles to thread the needle between the battling tones or rise above surface-level scrutiny, it is at least enjoyable company for a couple of hours, warmly presented and confidently shot (when the Tet Offensive explodes into Saigon, you feel the danger). It’s a little like its protagonist: slightly misguided, but ultimately hard to resent.

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Image showing two men in a street, one is carrying a camera

The Greatest Beer Run Ever review – Zac Efron’s charm can’t save Vietnam misfire

Green Book director Peter Farrelly makes an equally cliche-ridden follow-up, the true story of a man bringing beers to his army buddies

A s the good book – by which I mean Cheers – teaches us, beer is the currency of compassion. A can of suds won’t put you back more than a few bucks, and yet when given from one person to another, a drink represents the ultimate token of goodwill. When someone’s having a terrible day, you buy them a consolation beer. Someone does you a kindness, you buy them a gratitude beer. You do wrong by someone else, you buy them an apology beer. It requires so little and means so much, a simple gesture of shared humanity that puts a little light back in a cold, indifferent world. Or maybe that’s just what the beginning of a good buzz feels like.

Channeling this spirit of boozy benevolence is the main thing going for The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Peter Farrelly’s otherwise deficient follow-up to his flummoxing best picture recipient Green Book. And just as that film used a Black man’s suffering to lead a bigot to the revelatory epiphany that racism is actually pretty bad, this one, another unlikely road trip through a dangerous politicized battleground leavened by mild guy-to-guy comedy, takes the pain of an entire nation as fodder for a jingo’s realization that war may not be so great after all. Farrelly specializes in gracelessly teaching his audience things they already know, but where his Oscar-festooned feelgood buddy movie had a novel subject and tour de force from Mahershala Ali, his latest commits itself to regurgitating every Vietnam cliche with the laziest possible visual diction, led by an emotionally overextended Zac Efron .

He’s a fine fit for 80% of what John “Chickie” Donohue has to do in the course of this retelling of his real-life exploits delivering warm Pabst Blue Ribbons to his buddies from New York’s Inwood neighborhood stationed in Vietnam. As a civilian merchant marine with a couple of days in the combat zone before his ride ships out, he has to talk his way through a locked-down country crawling with people interested in killing him. He gets by because he’s using more than his wits, which are considerable; he figures out how to score rides between checkpoints after getting hip to the fact that because his mission is so difficult to believe, everyone assumes he’s CIA with a bad cover. But for the most part, the servicemen with whom he crosses paths cut him a break because he’s got the face and manner of Zac Efron, a likable jock who just wants to crack a brewski and make friends. The actor’s natural charm only gets him so far, however, the limits of his abilities visible every time he squinches up his face or dully goes blank to convey that it is now time to have some feelings.

He’s tasked with conveying a full-fledged metamorphosis of the soul as Chickie, though it’s a more manageable arc than Viggo Mortensen’s one-eighty on prejudice in the role of Tony Lip. As machine-gunned villages flood the TV stations, Chickie refuses to watch and peacenik protesters welcome his sister (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, yes, daughter to Andy) to their ranks, he digs in his heels on his blinkered notion of patriotism, yelling about the media’s negative skew with his buddies and the bartender (Bill Murray) at their regular dive. It’s not necessarily inaccurate that some people cannot conceive of empathy in the abstract and must see strife up close and personal to muster it, but Chickie’s slow pivot still feels like stating the obvious. Maybe his conclusions about the disordered chaos and inhumane pillaging of the land, received from a rumpled photojournalist (Russell Crowe) knocking back whiskies in a Saigon bar, only feel so matter-of-fact because every Vietnam movie ever made got there first.

At least the clear antecedents put some firepower behind their depictions of senselessness, more than Farrelly can say of his path-of-least-resistance film-making. Excepting only one haunting shot of a body falling from a helicopter until it vanishes into the canopy of trees, there’s nothing authentic enough to inspire the kind of transformative horror absorbed by Chickie. The soundtrack rounds up every played-out Nam-pop cut to the point that you notice the For What It’s Worth and Time Has Come Today-shaped holes; some sets appear incomplete, traces of 2022 visible under the period dressing. (A friend noted a modern airport terminal peeking out from the back of one shot.) The only thing real is the final insight that supporting the troops does not mean supporting the conflicts they’re made to fight, which could be of use to some theoretical news-averse Apple TV subscribers. But when this lesson has been delivered with such a pat lack of conviction, what manner of ornery war hawk could ever take it seriously?

The Greatest Beer Run Ever screened at the Toronto film festival and is available on Apple TV+ on 30 September

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Toronto film festival 2022
Toronto film festival

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Movies | movie review: ‘the greatest beer run ever’ recounts a war story that’s stranger than fiction.

Russell Crowe, left, and Zac Efron in "The Greatest Beer Run Ever."

For his follow-up feature to his Oscar-winning 2018 film “Green Book,” director Peter Farrelly (known mostly for his comic collaborations with his brother Bobby) has turned to a genial true story from the Vietnam War. “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” isn’t your typical Vietnam film. Based on a wild, wildly improbable real-life tale, it hews closer to comedy than gritty war drama — it’s Nam-com, if you will. But over the course of the film, it evolves from lark to dark, as the central protagonist learns the brutal reality of war during his harrowing journey delivering cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon to his pals.

Based on the book “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” by John “Chick” Donohue and J.T. Molloy, the script has been adapted by Farrelly, Pete Jones and Brian Hayes Currie. Zac Efron stars as Chickie Donohue, an unmotivated good-time guy from Inwood, Manhattan, who just can’t stand that his buddies from the neighborhood keep getting killed in the war. Yet he’s also mad at the news media for only showing the negative, and doesn’t understand why his sister keeps attending war protests. Efron’s version of Chickie is an easily swayed naif, which is how one thing leads to another.

When his ardently patriotic local bartender, The Colonel (Bill Murray) expresses his desire to bring the boys a beer, Chickie announces he’s going to do it, despite everyone’s belief that he’ll blow it off like he does everything. But things seem strangely aligned to go Chickie’s way. A merchant marine, it just so happens there’s a ship full of ammo bound for Saigon short a crew member. So he boards with a duffle bag full of PBR, and a head full of … well, absolutely nothing. Chickie has no plan, but then again, things are lining up to make sure that he achieves his harebrained mission.

It’s through a combination of dumb luck, charm, naiveté, street smarts and good old American friendliness that Chickie manages to scam his way onto military planes and choppers thanks to the fact that everyone thinks he’s CIA. Incredibly, he makes his way around the country to deliver beer to four of the boys from the ‘hood, and get caught in the Tet Offensive while he’s at it. While it may seem like he’s having a Forrest Gump adventure, when it comes to these facts, at least, there’s no creative license taken. Some stories just are stranger than fiction.

While the first half is stilted and smirky, Farrelly’s filmmaking serviceable at best, with some very rushed motivation, as Chickie finds his footing, so too does the film, falling in step with the young man as he realizes that this trip is much more than just a dare. What starts out light and a bit silly takes on a growing poignance with each PBR cracked, each “see ya back in the neighborhood.” So too does Farrelly’s aesthetic evolve, moving from a brightly lit, almost artificial-looking style, to a darker, grittier and more fluid approach as things prove to be more serious. Russell Crowe also offers some gravitas as a war correspondent who takes Chickie under his wing for a bit.

The beer run turns into a transformative experience as Chickie takes in the chaos, violence and loss of war, but more importantly, as he sees the reality of government lies and propaganda firsthand. Though the messaging is a bit flat-footed, it’s nonetheless effective, and clearly deeply felt, and it brings a sense of significance to this otherwise wacky real-life story, one that really does have to be seen to be believed.

“The Greatest Beer Run Ever” 2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPAA rating: R (for language and some war violence)

Running time: 2:06

How to watch: In theaters and streaming on Apple TV+ Friday

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Screen Rant

The greatest beer run ever review: farrelly’s war comedy lacks substance.

The film is messy and gets tangled up in its protagonist’s folly, but in the process, Zac Efron delivers a heartfelt and killer performance.

Zac Efron has had an enormous career that has spanned two decades. From movie musicals ( Hairspray ) and comedies ( Neighbors ) to biographical crime dramas ( Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile ), Efron shows no signs of slowing down when it comes to showcasing his talent. In his latest, Efron is John “Chickie” Donohue, a young man who travels to Vietnam at the height of the war to share laughs, support, and beer with his friends who’ve enlisted. Based on a true story and adapted from John “Chickie” Donohue and Joanna Molloy’s novel of the same name, The Greatest Beer Run Ever uncovers the unfortunate realities of blindly following a country’s messages about war. The film is messy and gets tangled up in its protagonist’s folly, but in the process, Zac Efron delivers a heartfelt and killer performance.

John “Chickie” Donohue (Zac Efron) is a 26-year-old U.S. Marine Corps veteran who works as a merchant seaman at the height of the Vietnam War. Torn between wanting to support his friends in the war without fighting alongside them, Chickie challenges himself to fulfill a preposterous purpose. To ensure his buddies know that there’s an entire support system cheering them on back in the U.S., Chickie decides to deliver the message himself, along with some American beers. What starts out as a well-intended journey to build morale quickly turns into a dangerous adventure as Chickie confronts this controversial war. Not only will he uncover terrible truths, but Chickie must find a way to survive in the process.

Related: Zac Efron Brings Beer To Vietnam War In Greatest Beer Run Ever Trailer

Director Peter Farrelly may have intended for his action comedy/drama to be a heartwarming journey of self-discovery, friendship, and sacrifice, but in execution, it reveals how ignorant Americans are when it comes to the realities of war. Through Chickie Donohue, Farrelly’s script, which was written in partnership with Pete Jones and Brian Currie, plays into the machismo and toxic nature of young men when it comes to understanding war and the reasons for its existence. As a result of this framework, enduring a 126-minute-long feature with Donohue’s character at the helm becomes unbearable even after only 15 minutes into the film.

That’s not to say that a protagonist of a story needs to be likable, but in The Greatest Beer Run Ever, there are inherent problems with his portrayal with respect to the story on screen. For one, Chickie had insanely juvenile takes when it came to the Vietnam War or any protestors of it. Any opinion that differed from his was simply disregarded and frowned upon as disrespectful and unpatriotic. Yet, the audience is supposed to cheer for the success of a man who only entered Vietnam to deliver beers because he couldn’t handle a little mockery and not fight alongside his brethren in a war that he so thoroughly believed in. It’s obnoxious, and it feels like an incredibly lazy way to build in any learning opportunities for the lead — especially when the messages about serving in war become overly preachy.

One could easily blame Efron for his portrayal of Donohue as the leading cause for such obscenely derisory elements in the script. But in reality, Efron’s heartfelt performance is what makes The Greatest Beer Run Ever watchable despite the screenplay. He gives his all when it comes to balancing both the comedy and sentimental components, but these moments shift on and off at lightning speeds. And quite frankly, it’s exhausting. That, in combination with the frustrations brought on by watching a human behave with no remorse for his stupidity and inexperience with war, is what makes the feature unenjoyable. Even after everything Donohue has seen and been through, he only ever snaps into reality seeing the lies unfold (and not the innocent Vietnamese children getting killed) before his very eyes.

As is, The Greatest Beer Run Ever has problems that extend even beyond its script. The three acts don’t feel as cohesive as they should be, the war scenery/set leaves a lot to be desired, and there’s simply no life in what could have been a vivacious feature. But that’s what happens in a film that caters to patriotism and the importance of serving one's country over substance, truth, and saying something profound. It gives the majority of the responsibility to Zac Efron, who was clearly up for the task, without any support to convert this barely watchable war comedy into a meaningful feature that exudes heart and authenticity. It's a sad truth for a script with so much potential.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever releases on Apple TV+ on September 30. The film is 126 minutes long and rated R for language and war violence.

IMAGES

The Greatest Beer Run Ever Review: Unexpectedly Good
The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022)
The Greatest Beer Run Ever Review: Zac Efron Shines In This War Film
"The Greatest Beer Run Ever" Gets First Official Trailer
Review: The Greatest Beer Run Ever' recounts war story that's stranger
The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022) Film-information und Trailer

COMMENTS

The Greatest Beer Run Ever movie review (2022)
Based on the book by Joanna Molloy and John "Chickie" Donohue, "The Greatest Beer Run Ever" tells the latter's true story of a misguided delivery to an active international conflict, where he learned, "Yes, Vietnam was bad." We meet Chickie (a miscast Zac Efron) in New York City in 1967, aimless enough that his dad gives him a hard time for sleeping in and lacking motivation.
The Greatest Beer Run Ever
Based on an incredible true story, "The Greatest Beer Run Ever" is a heartfelt coming-of-age tale about friendship, loyalty and sacrifice. Show Less Show More. Rating: R ...
The Greatest Beer Run Ever
A Geek Community. The Greatest Beer Run Ever gets so close to being a good movie but is held back by weak dialogue and never quite just saying what it means to be saying about war, masculinity ...
'The Greatest Beer Run Ever' Review: Vietnam on the Rocks
Sept. 22, 2022. The Greatest Beer Run Ever. Directed by Peter Farrelly. Adventure, Comedy, Drama, War. R. 2h 6m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through ...
The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022)
The Greatest Beer Run Ever: Directed by Peter Farrelly. With Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, Jake Picking, Kyle Allen. A man's story of leaving New York in 1967 to bring beer to his childhood buddies in the Army while they are fighting in Vietnam.
The Greatest Beer Run Ever Tells the Tale of a Clueless Dude
The Greatest Beer Run might have been a total disaster with any other star, but Efron—sporting a Tom Selleck-style mustache and looking perfectly affable in his dorky plaid shirts—manages to ...
The Greatest Beer Run Ever
Sep 15, 2022. Like "Green Book," The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a broad historical outing based on real people and real events, condensed down into an essence that can only be billed as "crowd-pleasing.". The trick this time: Farrelly seems far more aware of how he's playing fast and loose with history to offer a zippy feature to a ...
Review: 'Greatest Beer Run Ever' With Zac Efron on Apple TV+
Movie Review: In 'The Greatest Beer Run Ever,' now on Apple TV+, Zac Efron plays John "Chickie" Donohue, a New York man who, in 1967 and 1968, traveled to Vietnam to bring beer to his ...
'The Greatest Beer Run Ever' review: Zac Efron brings the boys a cold
For his follow-up feature to the Oscar-winning 2018 film "Green Book," director Peter Farrelly has turned to a genial true story from the Vietnam War. "The Greatest Beer Run Ever" isn't ...
The Greatest Beer Run Ever Review: Zac Efron Takes on Vietnam
Peter Farrelly's "The Greatest Beer Run Ever" is his first film since he won Best Picture for "Green Book," a film embraced by audiences and maligned by critics. This one hits many of ...
'The Greatest Beer Run Ever' Review: Zac Efron, in 'Nam, with Beer
Editor: Patrick J, Don Vito. Music: Dave Palmer. With: Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, Bill Murray, Kyle Allen, Jake Picking, Will Ropp, Archie Renaux, Christopher Reed Brown, Joe Adler, Kristin Carey ...
The Greatest Beer Run Ever Review
This is an advanced review out of the Toronto International Film Festival, where The Greatest Beer Run Ever made its world premiere. It will debut in select theaters and on Apple TV+ on Sept. 30 ...
The Greatest Beer Run Ever
A man is battered and bloodied by an interrogator and then thrown head-first out of a helicopter to fall to the forest floor below. When a battle breaks out in Saigon, Chickie and a reporter friend run for cover. Buildings get hit by explosive RPGs. A Jeep blows up, sending men flying.
'The Greatest Beer Run Ever' review: Zac Efron takes Pabst to Vietnam
"The Greatest Beer Run" has some impressively staged battle sequences, fine performances from Efron and the supporting cast, a handful of darkly funny moments and a few decent dramatic punches.
The Greatest Beer Run Ever Movie Review
Guns and shooting on battlefields. Characters are. Brief sexual reference. Parents need to know that The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a dramedy based on the true story of Merchant Marine Chickie Donohue (Zac Efron), who, in 1967, traveled to Vietnam to bring beer to his military buddies. It means well, but it's a bit heavy-handed.
The True Story Behind 'The Greatest Beer Run Ever'
It has turned into " The Greatest Beer Run Ever, " an adventure-comedy directed by Peter Farrelly and starring Zac Efron as Donohue. It opened in theaters on Sept. 23 and will reach Apple TV+ ...
The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022)
The Greatest Beer Run Ever, 2022. Directed by Peter Farrelly. Starring Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, Kyle Allen, Bill Murray, Jake Picking, Will Ropp, Archie Renaux, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, Will ...
The Greatest Beer Run Ever
The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a 2022 American biographical war comedy drama film directed and co-written by Peter Farrelly, based on the book of the same name by John "Chickie" Donohue and Joanna Molloy.The film stars Zac Efron and Russell Crowe, and follows the true story of Donohue, who as a young veteran sneaks into the Vietnam War to deliver some beer to his friends, who are serving their ...
The Greatest Beer Run Ever Review
The Greatest Beer Run Ever Review. New York, 1967. While drinking at a bar, John 'Chickie' Donohue (Zac Efron) hatches a hare-brained plan: travel to the frontline of the Vietnam War and bring ...
The Greatest Beer Run Ever review
Channeling this spirit of boozy benevolence is the main thing going for The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Peter Farrelly's otherwise deficient follow-up to his flummoxing best picture recipient Green ...
The Greatest Beer Run Ever
An impossible journey, all in the name of friendship. Based on a true story, The Greatest Beer Run Ever is now streaming on Apple TV+ https://apple.co/_TheGr...
Movie review: 'The Greatest Beer Run Ever' recounts a war story that's
"The Greatest Beer Run Ever" isn't your typical Vietnam film. Based on a wild, wildly improbable real-life tale, it hews closer to comedy than gritty war drama — it's Nam-com, if you will.
The Greatest Beer Run Ever Review: Farrelly's War Comedy Lacks Substance
The Greatest Beer Run Ever Review: Farrelly's War Comedy Lacks Substance. The film is messy and gets tangled up in its protagonist's folly, but in the process, Zac Efron delivers a heartfelt and killer performance. Zac Efron has had an enormous career that has spanned two decades.

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