As the good book – by which I mean Cheers – teaches us, beer is the currency of compassion. A can of suds won’t put you back more than a few bucks, and yet when given from one person to another, a drink represents the ultimate token of goodwill. When someone’s having a terrible day, you buy them a consolation beer. Someone does you a kindness, you buy them a gratitude beer. You do wrong by someone else, you buy them an apology beer. It requires so little and means so much, a simple gesture of shared humanity that puts a little light back in a cold, indifferent world. Or maybe that’s just what the beginning of a good buzz feels like.
Channeling this spirit of boozy benevolence is the main thing going for The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Peter Farrelly’s otherwise deficient follow-up to his flummoxing best picture recipient Green Book. And just as that film used a Black man’s suffering to lead a bigot to the revelatory epiphany that racism is actually pretty bad, this one, another unlikely road trip through a dangerous politicized battleground leavened by mild guy-to-guy comedy, takes the pain of an entire nation as fodder for a jingo’s realization that war may not be so great after all. Farrelly specializes in gracelessly teaching his audience things they already know, but where his Oscar-festooned feelgood buddy movie had a novel subject and tour de force from Mahershala Ali, his latest commits itself to regurgitating every Vietnam cliche with the laziest possible visual diction, led by an emotionally overextended Zac Efron.
