In 2018, he attracted a great deal of ire with Green Book, another movie based on a true story, that of a trip taken by jazz pianist and intellectual Don Shirley (played by Mahershala Ali) with his white bodyguard Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) through the Jim Crow-era South. Farrelly made his name directing open-hearted, if crude, comedies with his brother, Bobby Farrelly, pictures like Dumb & Dumber and There’s Something About Mary. (The script is by Farrelly, Pete Jones, and Brian Hayes Currie.) Still, to hold this movie up as any kind of mortal sin against filmmaking is both silly and unfair. It’s one giant crime scene.”Ĭornpone like that abounds in The Greatest Beer Run. “It’s mass murder.” Coates replies solemnly, “That’s what war is, Chickie. “This ain’t a war no more,” he tells Coates, wide-eyed as a lemur. And eventually, he becomes hip to the grim reality of this particular war and its ruthlessness. His dauntless bonhomie also wins over a crusty war correspondent, Russell Crowe’s Coates. But of course, he escapes, and manages to keep delivering those beers. (It must be those dorky plaid shirts.) It’s a joke until it’s not-at one point he runs afoul of a real CIA agent who’s just done something nefarious, and that endangers Chickie’s life. One of the movie’s recurring jokes is Chickie’s ability to slip into heavily restricted war zones because the Army higher-ups think he’s CIA. The Greatest Beer Run might have been a total disaster with any other star, but Efron-sporting a Tom Selleck-style mustache and looking perfectly affable in his dorky plaid shirts-manages to keep the movie on track with sheer laid-back charisma. So the local bartender known as the Colonel (Bill Murray) loads up a duffel bag with Pabst Blue Ribbon, and Chickie signs up for a merchant ship headed for Vietnam, talking his way through war zones with guileless charm.īut then, it’s Zac Efron we’re talking about. That has sparked some friction with his anti-war-protester sister (played by Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) like plenty of people at the time, Chickie hasn’t grasped that being anti-war doesn’t necessarily mean you’re anti-soldier, and he feels the need to step up and show his support for his buddies in a big way. The ludicrousness of the journey is the whole point: Chickie, along with his pals at home, thinks his soldier friends are fighting for a noble cause. In Peter Farrelly’s Greatest Beer Run Ever, Efron plays Chickie Donohue, a young Merchant Mariner from the Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood who, circa 1967, treks to Saigon and beyond to deliver cans of American beer to his neighborhood buddies fighting in the Vietnam War. Former Disney Channel heartthrob and song-and-dance man extraordinaire Zac Efron should be a much bigger star than he is, though maybe it’s better this way: those of us who love him can be happy whenever he shows up, without having to worry about Efron overkill.
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