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The Greatest Beer Run Ever Reviews

Its emotional core is hollow, the humor misses as often as it hits, and it leaves you with nothing new to think about.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 2, 2024

In The Greatest Beer Run Ever, [war] sort of is made for television. The filmmakers try to have their PBR-flavored cake and eat it too—and that just doesn’t fly in a movie about the lies and deception of mass murder that was Vietnam.

Full Review | Jul 16, 2024

Like the Pabst Blue Ribbon beer that it shills, The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a watered-down, unwelcome assault on the senses, unfit for consumption by anyone with working taste buds.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 3, 2024

In its two-hour runtime, the drama makes you chuckle and cry in equal measure, and all credits go to the writers for the characterisation of the protagonist, and to Zac Efron and Russell Crowe’s performances.

Full Review | Nov 20, 2023

Never mind that the Pabst Blue Ribbon Chickie carries throughout The Greatest Beer Run Ever has got to be the warmest in history. It symbolizes the character’s resolve and pride in what he believes is a nice gesture of goodwill.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Farrelly's screenplays present characters as surface-level and Efron doesn't have the dramatic range to try and create a character out of an archetype.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 16, 2023

Further proof that Farrelly did better, more charming work when he ballasted his soft side with raunch.

Full Review | May 2, 2023

It’ll get you acquainted with a guy who didn’t think impossible was a thing. It’s a detached joy to watch a movie where a character does something you would never dare do, and later find out that it really happened.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Feb 9, 2023

The Greatest Beer Run Ever gets so close to being a good movie but is held back by weak dialogue and never quite just saying what it means to be saying about war, masculinity, politics, or otherwise.

Full Review | Original Score: 6.5/10 | Jan 4, 2023

…has a jarring mix of tones to play with as it fuses comic macho braggadocio with the fog of war, but Peter Farrelly’s the right man for the job and just about pulls it off…

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 2, 2023

Ultimately, The Greatest Beer Run Ever leaves a bit of a bad taste in your mouth. It doesn’t have anything meaningful to say about the war and offers a surface-level exploration of the character of Chickie.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 19, 2022

What an unbelievable story, but truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction. Efron displays such an earnest quality that makes the character’s inherent foolishness endearing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 3, 2022

Farrelly seems to have thought Beer Run would float along on its frothy premise, punctuated by the occasional explosion of wartime violence. Instead, the film stumbles tipsily along, from lamp post to lamp post, uncertain of its way home.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 26, 2022

[It's] is fueled equally by its far-fetched silliness and its growing sense of sadness -- if not outrage -- over the war’s toll. Toss in a couple of fine supporting performances... and you’ve got a film that will stand up under repeated viewings.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Oct 20, 2022

Imagine watching Born on the Fourth of July without the drama and Good Morning, Vietnam with the comedy and that roughly sums up this poorly calculated tale.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 16, 2022

It's sort of meandering and well-meaning, but the tone never quite settled on what it's supposed to be.

Full Review | Oct 14, 2022

Tonally shifty, overlong, repetitive and as history simplistic, but well-made and an interesting effort to reach across the aisle from the socially liberal to the socially conservative.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 13, 2022

Every potential moment of clarity is interrupted by a knee-jerk swerve to the inane, as if Farrelly is uncomfortable with anything resembling discomfort or ambiguity. It’s all very well-intentioned and good-natured, but to what end?

Full Review | Oct 13, 2022

Efron is very good in this movie that is undecided as to whether or not it is a comedy or a drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Oct 11, 2022

In view of the absurd setting and the talent gathered, one expected more.

Full Review | Oct 11, 2022

Supported by

‘The Greatest Beer Run Ever’ Review: Vietnam on the Rocks

Zac Efron plays a man trying to deliver brewskis to his Vietnam War buddies in Peter Farrelly’s film.

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By Amy Nicholson

In the early winter of 1968, the 26-year-old civilian Chickie Donohue arrived in Vietnam with a duffel bag of brewskis and an errand that could be reasonably called idiotic, patronizing, suicidal — and, even, as this shaggily appealing comedy insists, “The Greatest Beer Run Ever.” Donohue (Zac Efron) has been double dog dared by his drinking buddies back home in Inwood, then a working-class Irish neighborhood in Manhattan, to hand-deliver a beer to four of their buddies serving in the war. “A sudsy thank you card!” Donohue exclaims, delighted by his own moxie. His farcical mission is mostly true and just the sort of crowd-pleaser about lunkhead enlightenment that intoxicates the director Peter Farrelly in the wake of his Oscar for “Green Book.”

Farrelly and his co-writers, Brian Currie and Pete Jones, see the national id reflected in Donohue’s patriotic, ill-reasoned rationale for his quest, which is clearly a few cans short of a, you know. To this layabout slacker, his blustering pals and their jingoistic barkeep, the Colonel (Bill Murray, near-invisible under a gruff flattop), a pull-tab of domestic ale supports the troops by reminding the fighters abroad that America reigns supreme. For a while, Farrelly feigns to agree; the film starts like a Super Bowl commercial and ends like a hangover.

When Donohue sets sail for Saigon, public opinion supports the conflict, an innocence Efron embodies by hitchhiking toward the front with a schmucky grin affixed like a shield. (Grunts one soldier, “Every once in a while, you run into a guy who’s too dumb to get killed.”) But by the time Donohue returns home, the Tet offensive — which he witnesses — will have turned the majority of Americans against the war, including him. After all, if a dingbat like him is able to bluff his way past officers to get to the battlefield, things are not under control.

The script is grounded in Donohue’s memoir of the same name (written with J.T. Molloy) and captures his bravado. (“I was a four-star general when it came to slinging BS,” he writes.) While the film makes his onscreen portrayal more oblivious, it backs his claim to have seen a United States tank blow a hole in the wall of its own embassy, only to later blame the blast on the Viet Cong.

A local traffic cop (Kevin K. Tran) and hard-living photojournalist (Russell Crowe with a brusque, sleeves-rolled-up cynicism) are invented amalgamations of the many people who stepped in to save Donohue’s neck. (If pressed, the movie would rather label its protagonist a dangerous distraction over a hero.) To heighten the tension — as well as extend empathy toward the Vietnamese villagers — Farrelly also concocts a scene where Donohue is forced to hide in the jungle from his own countrymen.

A few horrors are embellished from the book, particularly those that inspire the cinematographer Sean Porter to shoot in dramatic slow motion: a herd of napalmed elephants, a prisoner plummeting headfirst from a helicopter, a wounded soldier backlit by flames. Otherwise, the film’s style is, like its subject, stubbornly chipper (albeit with a marvelous psychedelic rock soundtrack that pulls from lesser-known acts like The Electric Prunes). Depth comes from Efron’s visible difficulty maintaining a smile as he comes to sense that he’s crossed the ocean only to discover a permanent gulf between him and his childhood friends. They’ve endured agonies he’ll never understand — and a barfly like him can’t deliver a cheers that will set things right.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever Rated R for language and violence. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters.

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