The Greatest Beer Run Ever film review — a fizzy, yeasty brew

In the 1990s, writer/director Peter Farrelly used to make gloriously crude but original comedies such as Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary. Now he makes Films about Issues. With 2018’s Green Book, he hit on an Oscar-winning formula in which a working-class white guy learns to question his assumptions about x while on a road trip through y, in period setting z. While in that film x = racism, y = the American South and z = the early 1960s, this time Farrelly has substituted the key variables for the Vietnam war, south-east Asia and the late 1960s to arrive at The Greatest Beer Run Ever.

The regular guy cruising for a bruising epiphany this time is Chickie Donohue (a serviceable Zac Efron), sometime Merchant Marine from a tight Catholic community in New York. Chickie has drunk the beer-flavoured Kool-Aid and believes that the US military is on a righteous mission in Vietnam to prevent the spread of communism. So do all his buddies at the bar run by grizzled second world war veteran The Colonel (Bill Murray).

To show support, Chickie quixotically decides to board a merchant ship heading to Vietnam so he can bring some beers to his buds on the front. However, what he finds in south-east Asia is not a well-oiled military machine but a profoundly rusty contraption. A little slow on the uptake, Chickie eventually grasps just how bad things are after witnessing enough suffering, cruelty, disinformation and absurd destruction, symbolised with heavy-hoofed emphasis by a stampede of wounded elephants running away from a napalm attack.

The script, based on a true story, is pocked with a cluster-bomb of clichés, from Russell Crowe’s gruff war correspondent to the nice and therefore clearly doomed traffic cop (Kevin K Tran) who helps Chickie find his way across Saigon. Yet there is an undeniable brio in the way this picaresque unfolds, thanks to nimble editing and the sucker-punches of a few well-chosen needle-drops. In the end, much like the seemingly feather-light yet bottomless duffel bag full of cans that Chickie lugs around, the film lacks heft but keeps producing a fizzy, yeasty brew.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas and on Apple TV Plus from September 30