After quite surprisingly winning the Oscar for the original screenplay and the best film with “Green Book”, Peter Farrelly decided to apply a similar feel-good, slightly moralizing and marginally populist formula to his next film. And again, at least, as far as I’m concerned, it worked, and although American critics panned “The Greatest Beer Run Ever,” this adventure-war humor drama is rarely a fun movie motivated by real people and real events. The story behind this film is completely unbelievable and unreal, and although the title of the film itself may seem clumsy, it was beyond expectations, fun, cute with a strong anti-war message.
The time and place of the action is the New York neighborhood of Inwood in Manhattan at the end of 1967, where the whole crew from the neighborhood gathers in a local pub run by a veteran of World War II and that typical, old American patriot called the Colonel (Bill Murray), but some of the members of society in in the meantime they ended up in Vietnam where they mostly volunteered. Listening to the stories of the glorious days and the fight for freedom and justice of the veterans of the Second World War, many of them were also carried away and decided to go to the war that we know today was anything but just, liberating and necessary.
America itself is already divided. While half of the people still support the American intervention in Vietnam, which is still at a relatively early stage, the other half protest and demand withdrawal from this unnecessary war. In the first half is also John Chickie Donahue (Zac Efron), a young man who spends his nights at parties and sleeps until the afternoon to the horror of his parents, while his sister Christine is in the second half. Chickie obviously didn’t have the guts to join the army himself, but he supports the American intervention, believing that they are fighting for the right thing, and when one day he learns that one of their team members was killed in Vietnam, he will come up with a rather silly idea to support his friends .
The story that he’s going to take American beer to all his friends from the neighborhood who are fighting in Vietnam will start off a bit like one of those 5th, 6th round beer pranks. But when word gets around the neighborhood about what Chickie is planning, this typical city slacker and resourceful jerk will realize that there is no going back. And so Chickie will embark on probably the longest delivery of beer cans in human history, and it will turn into a totally crazy, fun and extremely dynamic adventure. Although he is aware that there is a war in Vietnam, Chickie does not really understand what is happening there and what this mainly guerilla confrontation looks like. However, very soon he will see firsthand and understand what is really happening there and see that his sister was largely right and that the political propaganda that reaches them in America differs significantly from reality.
“I’m not really sure that we’re saving the world this time,” Chickie will conclude after a while, who will connect with foreign journalists in Saigon, including Arthur Oates (Russell Crowe is getting fatter from film to film), and will realize that the situation disastrous there. Although it’s a little hard to believe that it all happened like that in reality and certainly part of this beer adventure of discovery was dramatized, “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” was a fun and exciting movie. A film that most certainly will not repeat the success of “Green Book” when it comes to awards, but it is still a film well worth watching.