Peter Farrelly’s follow-up to Green Book is another mainstream comedy drama about a quote unquote old-fashioned guy. Patriotic New Yorker, John ‘Chickie’ Donohue (Zac Efron), travels to war-torn Vietnam and braves gunfire, jungle beasties and sinister CIA operatives, all because he wants to hand American beers to the boys from his neighbourhood. Sure, it’s a long way to go, but that’s what makes it so hilarious, right?
Ironically, the real-life mission that inspired The Greatest Beer Run Ever is way funnier than anything in the movie. In 1967, merchant sailor John Donohue lugged a suitcase of brewskis onto a boat bound for Qui Nhon. Two months later he reached his destination. By which point, he’d drunk all the beer.
Farrelly misses plenty of other tricks and embellishes where he doesn’t need to. Elsewhere, though, the film honours Donohue’s genuinely surreal story and makes good use of the versatile Efron (such an expert at playing dumb and dumb-ish), along with Bill Murray, as the loquacious bar owner who puts Donohue on the road to ‘Nam.
Russell Crowe, by contrast, is wasted as a cynical-yet-earnest war journalist (devotees of Evelyn Waugh’s insouciant satire Scoop will find nothing to interest them here).
Nor will it escape anyone’s attention that Farrelly lacks visual flair. Even There’s Something About Mary, the 1998 comedy gem he made with his brother Bobby, was cheap and cheerful. Nothing’s changed. For decades, the Vietnam war has been a gift to American cinema, but Farrelly doesn’t even try to compete with the likes of Coppola, Cimino, Kubrick or Malick.
That said, one horrific episode works precisely because the mood up to then is so genial. And there’s a lovely moment where a friendly Vietnamese traffic controller asks for Chickie’s Inwood address and our hero lights up (he’s finally met someone as randomly intrepid as himself). Meanwhile, everything to do with the plot strand concerning Chickie’s MIA best friend Tommy (Will Hochman) challenges myths about barfly bros who have each other’s backs.
This is the kind of flick you can imagine Homer Simpson happily watching on TV, right up until the point where Chickie decides to do “less drinking, more thinking”. Those words would surely cause Homer to chuck an (empty) can of Duff at the screen and wail, “BORING!”
Should you have the time to google the 81 year-old Donohue, you’ll discover what happened to him and the three friends he tracked down and bought tins of booze for. The guy’s a tonic. If you’re in an undemanding mood, the same goes for this movie.
126mins, cert 12A
