Movie Review : The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022)
I'm a fan of bad ideas. Both on a personal and theoretical level. When devoid of catastrophic consequences, bad ideas almost always lead to interesting moments. They reveal character and connect people in a different way than what's socially expected from them. The Greatest Beer Run Ever tells perhaps the story of the worst idea anyone's ever had, which also turned an ordinary man into the greatest bro in the universe. It's a little rough around the edges, but it has the biggest heart like its protagonist.
The Greatest Beer Run Ever tells the story of Chickie Donohue (a stiff, but far from uninteresting Zac Efron) a young merchant seaman in the sixties. Chickie is a simple man who works hard and drinks perhaps even harder with the boys on his days off. When his friends and people from the neighbourhood start getting shipped to Vietnam and coming back in body bags, he gets a crazy idea that doesn't involve basic training. Chickie decides to pay his friends a visit and bring beer like he's War Santa or something.
Beer as a Love Language
This movie is what you'd call a dramatic comedy. A funny film that explores serious ideas. One of the funniest things in The Greatest Beer Run Ever is that Chickie travels halfway across the world to a fucking war zone to deliver a product that is already widely available over there. The serious part is that it's not really the beer that Chickie is bringing them. It's hope. It's the idea that people in America haven't forgotten about them and that there's perhaps still a tiny sliver of normalcy left in their lives.
I don't know about you, but that gives me the feels.
Whether you're stuck in a war zone or just going through a hard time, a friend offering you a beer isn't just about drinking beer and getting intoxicated together. It's about creating a moment where you can relax and be yourself. Whether you want to confide or simply exist without anything being expected of you for a moment. Unable to stop the war or protect his buddies, Chickie risks his life several times over in order to offer them a boozy respite. This is both insane and oddly moving, like most terrible ideas usually are.
At the beginning, no one believes Chickie is actually going to go through with it. Because it's a bad idea, but also because no one is ever extraordinary until they do something extraordinary. Everyone just sees Chickie as this loudmouth grown neighbourhood kid. But kudos to Zac Efron, you can see the desire burn in his eyes. The existential discomfort with the situation and the physical toll it takes on him. He never NOT looks like Zac-Efron-with-a-mustache, but he carries the important ideas in his interpretation.
The Farrelly Factor
So, there's a lot of wholesome, heartfelt stuff in The Greatest Beer Run Ever. There's no denying that. But the man who created Dumb & Dumber and There's Something About Mary Peter Farrelly didn't lose an iota of his comedic timing. I had more laugh out loud moment watching this movie than I had consuming any other piece of media this entire calendar year and once again, the devil is in the details. The Greatest Beer Run Ever never goes full slapstick. It's the relatable stuff that goes a long way.
For example, there's a scene where Chickie and his buddies crash and antiwar protest in the first hour of the movie. It would've been easy to make that scene 100% ideological and straightforward, but the characters mix up absolutely everything. Ideological conflict, personal life, sexual innuendo between Chickie's sister and another protestor. The characters so trapped by their emotions, it makes them both funny and relatable to the outside eye. It's uniquely funny in a way a Peter Farrelly movie is.
*
The Greatest Beer Run Ever is an ambitious movie made on a shoestring budget, so it looks rough at times. From the top of my head, I’m thinking of a scene where a bombed building features the worst CGI flames I've ever seen. Some of the support cast also come off as a little stiff. But if you decide to watch a movie like this one, it's because of what it means and not necessarily how it comes across. It looks a little cheap, but it has interesting things to say and its heart is absolutely in the right place.
