When Peter Farrelly’s “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” was announced for the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, there was never much question when it would screen. Even though the prestige slots at TIFF are on the first weekend, “Beer Run” would be a Tuesday night film, because that’s the same stealth slot that Farrelly’s precious film, “Green Book,” took when it premiered at the festival five years ago on its way to winning the TIFF audience award and the Oscar for Best Picture.
And “The Greatest Beer Run Ever,” which had its debut at Roy Thomson Hall on Tuesday, is like Farrelly’s last film in more ways than the choice of venue and day. The director once known for slapstick comedies like “Dumb and Dumber” and “There’s Something About Mary” seems to have a new specialty: movies based on stranger-than-fiction true stories about working class, salt-of-the-earth guys from big East Coast families who embark on adventures through which they have their eyes opened to injustices to which they had been blissfully ignorant.
With “Green Book,” it was Viggo Mortensen’s Tony Vallelonga, a nightclub bouncer in New York, chauffeuring Mahershala Ali’s jazz pianist Don Shirley through the Deep South in the fieriest days of the Civil Rights movement. In “Beer Run,” it’s Zac Efron’s Chickie Donohue, who works in the merchant marine in New York City and undertakes the impossible mission of delivering beers to his neighborhood buddies who had been sent to Vietnam; he learns along the way that the war wasn’t exactly the proud battle for democracy he’d thought.
Clearly, the mission of Farrelly’s protagonist has gotten more preposterous since “Green Book.” And while the filmmaker has apparent affection for the regular guys at the heart of his films, and a taste for balancing humor with humanity, the fizz has gone out in “Beer Run.” The early scenes are at times surprisingly awkward – and while things get better when Chickie gets to Vietnam and Russell Crowe shows up to (briefly) ground the movie with his quiet gravity, “Beer Run” still lurches from silliness to preachiness in a way that’s rarely satisfying.
Lots of people had quarrels with “Green Book,” which was certainly not the most esteemed recent Oscar winner (though it is the highest-grossing one of the last 12 years). But that film was grounded by two fine actors surrounded by a supporting cast that made up a believably chaotic Italian-American family, and Farrelly seemed to have a clear hand on the tone he was after.
“Beer Run” is clunkier, particularly at the start. Initially (and no doubt this is intentional to leave room to show their growth), Chickie and his bar buddies are a collection of cliches who never feel like real people even if they’re based on them. They’re well-meaning oafs who support our troops without really knowing what that means; even after when the eighth neighborhood boy dies in Vietnam, they’re still appalled by the local anti-war protests, in which Chickie’s sister is a participant.
When the local bartender, a World War II vet phoned in by Bill Murray in an extended cameo that is vaguely amusing but frustratingly one-note, says he’d like to send the neighborhood boys a beer to show that people appreciate their sacrifice, Chickie blurts out, “I could do that.” But could he? And even if he can sign on with a freighter taking cargo to Southeast Asia, what can he do when he gets to Saigon?
He embarks on the trip at least partly because nobody he knows thinks he’ll actually do it, and he bumbles his way around Vietnam with a bag full of beer that dispenses so many cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon it starts to feel like a cross between a clown car and Jesus’s loaves and fishes. (Chickie and his pals, Catholics all, would either appreciate or be offended by the Jesus comparison.)
The point of the movie, of course, is what Chickie learns in Vietnam — that it’s a quagmire, that the good guys and bad guys aren’t as clear-cut as they might have seemed back at the bar, and that Americans are being lied to about what’s happening by their government.
But to learn his lessons, he’s got to find his way around a good chunk of Vietnam, hitching rides on military helicopters because the top brass figures that he must be CIA, since a civilian can’t really be wandering around in country. (If this wasn’t based on a true story, nobody would ever believe it – and even knowing that the real Chickie actually did this, you have to wonder about a few details.)
To their credit, most of Chickie’s army buddies aren’t particularly thrilled when he shows up with that bag o’ brew; the usual reaction is more along the lines of “why the hell are you risking your life to bring me a can of warm beer, you idiot?”
Farrelly pulls off some decent action scenes, though Chickie apparently showed up on a day when all of the Viet Cong snipers who could actually hit what they were aiming at were on holiday. Or maybe one of his pal’s fellow soldiers gets it right when he says, “Every once in a while you run into a guy who’s too dumb to get killed.”
Chickie’s journey includes ruthless CIA agents (real ones, not fake ones like Chickie), enemy gunfire and wildlife that ranges from rampaging elephants to really big bugs; it’s set to a collection of songs that suggests Farrelly went out of his way to find era-appropriate that had never, ever before been used in any Vietnam movie: the Association’s “Cherish,” Jefferson Airplane’s “Today,” the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night,” the Hombres’ “Let It All Hang Out,” and more.
Meanwhile, Chickie starts to learn a few things, most of them stated as bluntly as possible by people he runs into along the way: “I think you’re gonna find that it’s a lot harder to get out of a war than to get into one” is a typical example.
If they gave him more to do, Crowe could be the MVP of “Beer Run” – but his first scene, in which he’s a virtuoso of world-weariness and rough-hewn grace, is only about five minutes long, and then he disappears until the home stretch. His return is welcome, but he’s also increasingly given speeches and lectures to deliver, because, once again, Chickie apparently needs to have things spelled out very clearly.
In “Green Book,” Mortensen managed to make a goofball’s awakening seem plausible, but Efron struggles to do the same. And while “Beer Run” circles some interesting ideas about how people refuse to believe truths that might contradict their preconceptions – a timely enough observation, of course – it’s a long drink of a surprisingly flat brew.
Apple TV+ will release “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” on Sept. 30.
