The Greatest Beer Run Ever

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, ...

“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. [abysmal Firestarter](https://www.vulture.com/article/movie-review-stephen-kings-firestarter-with-zac-efron.html), which the actor essentially walked through, The Greatest Beer Run Ever is welcome proof that he can run with the right material. 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. 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. 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. 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.

The comedy-drama film "The Greatest Beer Run Ever" is based on an impossibly true incident from recent American history, and yet is an uninspiring letdown.

In the end, Chick Donahue visits a park used by the anti-war protestors as a meeting ground and lights a candle in honor of the fallen soldiers. However, ever since talking to his friends serving in the war, he had realized that the people back home calling for the war to be stopped and the soldiers to be returned perhaps made more sense. By now, he realizes that none of his foolishly heroic actions, or perhaps nothing other than the end of the war, would be enough to compensate for the stress and dangers the soldiers had to face each day. However, in a rather dramatic manner, his only company on the plane back home are dozens of coffins wrapped with the American flag, containing the bodies of soldiers who were killed in the war. The result is that neither has any lasting effect and no matter how good the individual performances are, the film as a whole look just shallow and forgettable. Here he met with a group of American and international journalists who were reporting on the war, and Chick immediately shared his opinion on their work. The two men run through the streets and bear witness to what essentially was the Fall of Saigon, and Arthur even helps Chick out of trouble. The man had set out on this journey to cheer up his friends and give them a good time, wholeheartedly believing that a can of local American beer and the company of an old friend would be enough to cheer them up. When the superior refuses to let him leave the ship, Chick cooks up a story about having to meet his stepbrother to tell him of their father’s death and manages to get permission finally. Therefore, whenever someone calling themselves, a civilian tourist went up to Vietnam, the army officials clearly understood them to be secretive CIA agents and did not meddle in their actions. It is in this last regard that “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” falters the most, as it fails to make itself convincing or move viewers beyond any superficial degree. The comedy-drama film “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” is based on an impossibly true incident from recent American history, and yet is an uninspiring letdown.

The Pitch: Peter Farrelly is back with his first film since Green Book, a biopic about an average white guy from New York in the 1960s who learned a lot ...

There’s a moment in this film where Chickie is about to catch a plane headed to the front with his bag of beers (we’ll get to those in a second). His new one, The Greatest Beer Run Ever, is a little different: it’s a biopic about an average white guy from New York in the 1960s who learns a lot about the world by stepping outside of his comfort zone in the Vietnam War, whilst simultaneously charming the more worldly people around him. The Myopic Lens of Your Own Self-Actualization: The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a film about why the Vietnam War was bad.

"The Greatest Beer Run Ever" is now playing at Flix Brewhouse Madison, Marcus Palace, Marcus Point and on Apple TV+.

Farrelly is clearly going for a “Good Morning, Vietnam”-like tone, balancing light comedy against the horrors of war without tipping too far in either direction. “War ain’t a TV show,” growls the bartender, nicknamed The Colonel (Bill Murray in a small but memorable role). In this case, the guy is Chickie Donohue (Zac Efron), a good-time Merchant Marine in 1967 New York who mans a barstool while many of his friends are off fighting in Vietnam.

Chickie Donahue's crazy trip to Vietnam comes to life in the Zac Efron film 'The Greatest Beer Run Ever.' The real guy breaks down fact from fiction.

As in “Beer Run,” Donohue would often talk with them at the rooftop bar of the Caravelle Hotel. But he knew where to get more once he arrived: “I went to the enlisted men's clubs and refurbished the beer.” Coates is a composite of people Donohue met there, including journalists and also a businessman who sold computers to the Vietnamese government. That's elephant (poop).’ I said, ‘What the hell, there's no elephants here.’ So he says, ‘Oh yeah, (the Viet Cong) use them to carry their artillery and their heavy weapons.”’ In the movie, Chickie is on a road late at night when a pack of elephants inexplicably walks in front of him. When the Colonel wished he could bring beers to the boys over there, “I said, ‘All right, I can do that,”’ Donohue recalls. That, in addition to so many funerals and so many young guys who had already died,” Donohue says. “This is like ‘Dumb and Dumber’ meets ‘Apocalypse Now.’ ” But it did actually happen, and Donohue, 81, attended the recent premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival with all four friends he brought beers to on his epic quest. In the movie, members of the military assume he’s with the CIA, and Chickie doesn’t correct them as he makes his improbable trip. Malloy’s 2017 memoir – was “the stupidest idea I've ever heard of,” Farrelly says, explaining why he had to direct the film. “I would be terrified,” the actor confesses. “I would cave in seconds.”

Peter Farrelly's new movie might have been a disaster with any other star, but Zac Efron manages to keep it on track with laid-back charisma.

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. [great deal of ire with ](https://time.com/5527806/green-book-movie-controversy/)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](https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-people-2019/5567869/mahershala-ali/)) with his white bodyguard Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) through the Jim Crow-era South. 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. One claim was that Farrelly had failed to consult with Shirley’s surviving relatives and had basically highjacked a [Black man’s story](https://time.com/5453443/true-story-behind-green-book-movie/) for his own cheerful aims, with the goal of making white folks feel good about themselves. [misguided](https://time.com/5525106/bohemian-rhapsody-green-book-movie-shame/), it’s harder to make the case that it was an act of racist calculation. 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. And eventually, he becomes hip to the grim reality of this particular war and its ruthlessness. (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. 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. 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. On the other, in stupidly planning one of his surprise visits, he nearly gets one of his buddies killed. It all sounds just crazy enough to be a true story, and basically, it is.

The incredible real story of a young man's mission to bring his friends beers in a war zone has been transformed into a major movie starring Zac Efron, ...

"There was a lot of death and a lot of hurt," he recalled in 2020. "It was a blur after that, just a lot of back slaps and laughing." "While I was there, I came to the conclusion that this was a bad, wrong war … "The fact that Chickie was able to find me is nothing short of a miracle, I thought I was being punked," Duggan, 74, told PEOPLE in 2020. He maintains that he was simply doing the right thing. His first order of business when he got back to his neighborhood in Inwood? "The first three days in Vietnam, I got to see three different guys, and I only had six guys on my list," recalls Donohue. Shortly thereafter, he found work on a cargo ship, packed a duffel bag full of beers, and set out on one of the most improbable goodwill missions ever conceived. In talking about ways to show more support for the men serving in it overseas, bartender George Lynch (who is played by "But [Chickie's] a character, and it's his story. "It's one of those unbelievable real-life scenarios you can't believe a guy got himself into," says Efron, 34, who plays Donohue in the film. Five months (and many close calls) later, Donohue returned to New York with an incredible story to tell — one that was first detailed in his 2020 memoir

A Vietnam War movie, set in Vietnam, but with barely any Vietnamese characters. the greatest beer run ever feature Image Via Apple TV+.

Perhaps nothing better symbolizes The Greatest Beer Run Ever’s Western perspective than the fact that it seems convinced it’s doing the right thing while either silencing or exploiting the people of a foreign land. However, making a movie that boils down the Vietnam war and the native people impacted by it through Western eyes, without ever offering extra dimensions to these characters, is innately rooted in harmful ideology. The minimal number of Vietnamese characters in The Greatest Beer Run Ever is troubling, but the script could’ve fleshed out that handful of individuals to be incredibly memorable and it would’ve been less of an issue. How can we understand how the Vietnam War impacted the lives of innocent people when the movie itself isn’t interested in those lives to begin with? Moving onto what’s contained within the text of the film, The Greatest Beer Run Ever’s interest in native Vietnamese characters is incredibly limited. But if there’s anything The Greatest Beer Run Ever does “right,” it’s in providing an exemplary feature-length showcase for all the creative constraints that come with framing the Vietnam War through Western eyes.

Zac Efron sports a stunning mustache in Apple TV+ 'The Greatest Beer Run Ever,' in which he plays John Donohue, who deliver beer to buddies in Vietnam.

[His father knows how to rock some serious upper lip hair](https://www.instagram.com/p/Byy_PoMFbjt/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=0e184b99-962c-45f8-8f2d-a0986e5517c1), and [his brother also effortlessly pulls off the look](https://www.instagram.com/p/BvkJuKZhUX0/?igshid=Y2ZmNzg0YzQ%3D). Though The Greatest Beer Run Ever [isn’t Efron’s first stache](https://www.instagram.com/p/BdJIj9qHDdf/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=408c7c0f-e8f9-47ae-a3c4-307fcfd0bd50), it is one of his most triumphant. As if Efron being repeatedly called “Chickie” and “Chick” wasn’t hot enough, the full, dark, lush strip of hair steals the show as he carries pitchers of beer through a crowded bar, struts down the street, or crouches in the dirt. The actor is so charming with a clean-shaven face that nothing truly prepared me for the elevated hotness of him sporting an unexpectedly thick mustache. As a teen in the 2000s, I grew up watching Efron’s rise to bare, babyfaced fame in Summerland, Hairspray, and the High School Musical movies. The singular coming-of-age story is an ode to friendship that offers a unique perspective on war, but it’s also irrefutable proof that Efron can work a mustache.