Editor’s Note: After a few years working remotely, Nick Johnston is back in Canada all week covering the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. We’re all very excited! Read through our continuing coverage of TIFF 2022, check out our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of this year and past festivals.
Peter Farrelly’s dramas – excuse me, Academy Award-winning director Peter Farrelly’s dramas – often are three or four choices away from being one of the comedies he made with his brother in the decade or so when they were on top of the Studio Comedy world. If one were to isolate all of the Viggo Mortensen solo scenes from a film like Green Book and put them in sequence, it’s hard not to imagine Matt Dillon showing up as a ’50s private dick or Jack Black appearing as, I don’t know, Nikita Khrushchev (it’s actually kind of fun to imagine Viggo’s chubby gangster getting involved in the corn-related fracas at Garst Farm, which remains one of the most bizarre historical incidents to fade into our collective memory). The same is true of The Greatest Beer Run Ever, a feature-length advertisement for the healing power of – say it with me in a Dennis Hopper voice – PABST! BLUE! RIBBON! depicting the true story of what happens when your affable neighborhood drunk decides to head to an active war zone to toss out brews to his boys in uniform. When Farrelly conforms to the Oscar-bait mean and tries to make a historical political statement, Beer Run, like Green Book before it, falls flat on its face, although it does so in a boring fashion compared to the tweetstorm-causing trainwreck that was 2018’s Best Picture winner. But when it isn’t afraid to just be a very stupid comedy about a pure-of-heart moron, it’s honestly a pretty amusing time, thanks in no small part to the efforts of its lead.
Zac Efron is about as underrated of a comedic actor as you can get: the dude’s still remembered for High School Musical and Nicholas Sparks romances, even though he’s been in several good films (Neighbors, The Beach Bum, etc.) and has been memorable in each of them. He’s a smart actor who, like Channing Tatum, knows how to play dumb (although their particular approaches to thickness diverge, given the difference in personality and physique between the two, with Tatum actually being thicc and Efron being more typically built), and uses it to his advantage – it’s what made his Bundy creepy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile. He’s very well-cast here as John Donohue, known to all his boys as “Chickie,” a merchant mariner who lives with his folks in a crowded Manhattan apartment between voyages and spends his nights running up bar tabs he’ll never pay off. It’s the middle of the Vietnam War, but Chickie’s already served – in Massachusetts before the war broke out – and, as he’s well-insulated from the reality of the war aside from what he sees on television, he’s also a good patriot. He fights with his sister, a keenly conscientious anti-war protester, who he and his boys no longer understand. Over the course of a suds-soaked night full of discussions about their pals overseas, he cooks up an idea: What if he were to go over to Vietnam on a Merchant Marine ship, with a duffel bag full of brews and some amount of guile, and give all of his neighborhood friends in the service a brew, to show them how much the folks back home appreciate them.
Nobody thinks he will go through with it, and chief amongst the doubters is Chickie himself, but a spot miraculously opens up on a ship on the same day he figures he should at least give himself the plausible deniability that comes with trying something you don’t really intend to do. So, in an attempt to do a decent thing and to prove everyone who ever doubted him wrong, he goes through with it. A few months later, his ship docks in Saigon, and, after lying to his Captain about his reasons for going into the field, he heads out into the country, unaware of the danger that awaits him. What follows is a journey as implausible as it is often amusing, with Chickie taking advantage of a key misunderstanding in the field: while drinking brews with one of his boys, an MP, and his entire barracks, he discovers that a C.O., normally a pain in the ass to Chickie’s friend and his fellow troops, is terrified of him. That’s because the only person dumb enough (or brave enough) to dress like they’re teeing off at the U.S. Open in a country where the best-equipped and trained soldiers get mangled is a “tourist” – that is, a C.I.A. agent. So Chickie exploits this misunderstanding to jet across the country in choppers and jeeps and whatnot, heading to friend after friend, each receiving him worse than the last. He soon finds out that he’s made a pretty bad choice, between the foxhole and late-night gunfire and the actual Langley men out there in the field, and returns to Saigon, after completing much of his journey, just in time to spend the Tet Offensive with a war photographer (Russell Crowe) who just can’t help but be endeared with Chickie’s earnestness.
Again, there’s ample material here for a genuine comedy: the “War Is Hell” shit is wholly derivative of other, better films, and Farrelly could have made his points without having to dip into the kind of ill-handed sappiness and “action” that is endemic to any film about the Vietnam War made in the last twenty years or so. It might have been even more daring to do so, but, understandably, he’d probably blanche at committing to a potentially risible tone, given that all of the real-life figures on whom the film is based are still around. Especially grating is his friendship with a South Vietnamese traffic guard, christened “Oklahoma” by Chickie because of the guy’s love for the musical, which strikes that perfect mixture of perfunctory and bad-taste before it ends in the gaudiest and mawkish way possible. But the parts of Beer Run that do work work really well, such as Chickie’s subterfuge about being in the Agency, including his fooling of an overeager corporal at a military base he finds himself at, who takes every one of his denials and vague replies as simply what a “tourist” has to do in his scenarios. Crowe is a kindly presence, and Bill Murray shows up for a minute and a half as the bartender at the local watering hole in Chickie’s neighborhood, whose patriotic passion after fighting in the “Good War” has colored his views on ‘Nam, but it is Efron’s show, complete with pratfalls and goofy Newh-Yawk accent. Chickie’s realization that he might have been wrong feels incomplete somewhat in the film, but Efron sells it with a genuine doubt, presenting to us a character whose golden heart remains unvarnished even if his eyes are opened by what they see in The Shit.
If Farrelly were as committed to the mechanics and tone as Efron is to his character, Beer Run might be genuinely special and strange, different enough to be memorable. But its ultimate failure can’t erase the quality of Efron’s work here and remains another delightful step forward in his odd career.