Draft Dodging the Point — The Greatest Beer Run Ever

At one point, the protagonist’s quest is described as «idiotic but noble.» The same may be said of The Greatest Beer Run Ever as a whole, except I’m not too sure about the «noble» part.  

As a Zac Efron vehicle, it’s a good career move away from misguided stabs at Serious Acting (Gold, the Bundy movie — you know the one, don’t make me type it). He’s perfectly cast here as a shallow pretty boy nobody takes seriously. Unfortunately for Efron, this time it’s the film itself that’s utterly clueless. 

The long and short of it is: war is no laughing matter. That’s why you don’t see many war comedies — at least not good ones. MASH worked (for some) because it was cynical and mean-spirited enough to undercut its own setting; The Great Dictator worked because Chaplin satirized fascism without actual Nazis on-screen. But The Greatest Beer Run Ever plays like Good Afternoon, Vietnam: another tale of a wisecracking lunkhead who embarks on a supposedly true but thoroughly bogus adventure, stumbles into a phony epiphany, and discovers — shocker! — that war is indeed bad after all. Who would’ve guessed? 

Why call it bogus? Start with the bottomless duffel bag of beer cans, which somehow never runs dry (sure, he could buy more in Vietnam — American beer is plentiful there — but that would kill what little point his trip has). Add the CIA impersonation he gets away with, the time he — a civilian — is sent sprinting across no man’s land, the string of miraculous encounters, and, yes, the CGI elephants. 

That brings us to the elephant in the room: this film treats war the same way it treats alcoholism — as something you can coast through without consequence or hangover. It wouldn’t be too much of a comedy if it confronted the carnage head-on, Platoon-style. But by tiptoeing around the horror, Beer Run ends up naïve at best, callous at worst. To borrow from Boyz N the Hood: the filmmakers either don’t know, don’t care — and they sure don’t show. 

Even when the film finally depicts violence, it feels detached from the larger Vietnam context. Computer-generated explosions and digital flames engulfing soldiers look more Starship Troopers than Belfast — cartoonish, weightless, unreal. 

In the end, the movie’s sentimentality rings as hollow as its plotting. Case in point: Russell Crowe, doing his grizzled action-man routine like he wandered over from a Ridley Scott shoot next door. His character is supposed to lend gravity, but like everything else here, he’s just playacting.

Works Cited

Altman, Robert, director. MASH. 20th Century Fox, 1970.

Chaplin, Charlie, director. The Great Dictator. United Artists, 1940.

De Palma, Brian, director. The Greatest Beer Run Ever. Apple TV+, 2022.

Levinson, Barry, director. Good Morning, Vietnam. Touchstone Pictures, 1987.

Platoon. Directed by Oliver Stone, performances by Charlie Sheen and Willem Dafoe, Hemdale Film Corporation, 1986.

Verhoeven, Paul, director. Starship Troopers. TriStar Pictures, 1997.

Branagh, Kenneth, director. Belfast. Focus Features, 2021.

Singleton, John, director. Boyz N the Hood. Columbia Pictures, 1991. 

Related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqxziDlZOIo&pp=ygUidGhlIGdyZWF0ZXN0IGJlZXIgcnVuIGV2ZXIgdHJhaWxlcg%3D%3D

#movieReview #theGreatestBeerRunEver #zacEfron

#TheGreatestBeerRunEver: Given what happened with the last #PeterFarrelly #film in #GreenBook, I'm not expecting a lot of people to agree with me here. But for what it's worth, I enjoyed myself with this one.

Full review at Mahan's Media: https://betwixtstarproductions.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-greatest-beer-run-ever-2022-movie.html #movies #filmreview #moviereview #cinemastodon #comedy #drama #vietnamwar #ZacEfron #russellcrowe #chickiedonohue #buyingaroundisseriousbusiness #RedRibbonReviewers

If anything, #TheGreatestBeerRunEver highlights two things: War is bad, and white people can be super dumb.

#ZacEfron #movie #movies #warmovies #comedy #drama #dramady #NowStreaming #NowPlaying #review #reviews #Appletv #Appletvplus

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