Zac Efron Plays Chickie Donohue, The Man Who Delivers Beer In A War Zone

Zac Efron, who has previously starred in Baywatch and 17 Again, shows a different side in his latest film.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever is the kind of title you’d expect from a LadBible video rather than a feature film released during awards season.

And while Apple TV’s new movie, which stars Zac Efron and Russell Crowe, might not be traditional Oscar bait, it’s worth looking beyond its somewhat trivial title.

Director Peter Farrelly’s previous film, Green Book, won Best Picture in 2019, meaning there’s a lot of interest in the story he’s chosen for his latest project.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever follows the true story of Chickie Donohue, a US Marine who traveled the world in 1968 to deliver a case of beer to his comrades fighting in the Vietnam War.

Morale among the soldiers was low at the time, so the New Yorker embarked on a four-month journey with a (probably very heavy) sack of beer on his back to raise spirits.

Delivering beer to crews in your neighborhood is all fun and games until Donohue actually gets there and is confronted with the rather brutal reality of war. (One character tells him the expedition is “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”) Donohue himself had served in the Marines for four years but never seen combat.

“Tonally, it starts off easy,” Farrelly told reporters earlier this month after the film’s Toronto premiere. “The silliness of this guy trying to get his friends a beer in Vietnam is just crazy and you see him smiling then when he gets to Vietnam reality hits and the tone changes but it’s natural .

“It didn’t take much work on my part, it took a lot of work [Efron’s] Part because he had to become a different person along the way.”

The film is based on a book written by the real Chickie Donohue (pictured with Efron).

Efron says, “I couldn’t believe it was a true story, it just sounded like a very stupid idea and young and stupid. But the journey that begins there is very magical and profound. So it turned out to be one of the coolest gestures you could possibly do.”

The film’s tone feels a bit muddled, but that’s partly because the tone of the original expedition must have been the same. The backdrop of bombs, dead bodies, and jars of blood somewhat fits what Donohue is trying to do.

But Efron argues, “I love the human element that you can find in some of the darkest moments, and there’s always something that’s unique or pops out of the tension that can make you laugh.”

“What interested me,” adds Farrelly, “was that it was a guy who, during an act of war, went into a war zone to bring beers to his friends. I love this person, the stupidity, the hubris and the crowd. It takes a lot of heart to want to do that and actually go through with it.”

Early reviews of the film were mixed. IndieWire’s Kate Erbland said Beer Run “is not a gritty war film; it’s shiny and entertaining and often fun. Farrelly has a history that requires both blind faith and mad optimism.”

But she conceded, “For some viewers, the distance between pure entertainment and the Tet offensive may be too great a bridge.”

Russell Crowe plays a war photographer that Donohue meets on his journey

Other critics were much less enthusiastic. The Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Rechtshaffen called it “a meandering, disjointed production struggling to find a satisfying tone,” while the Guardian’s Charles Bramesco accused it of “rubbing every Vietnam cliché with the laziest visual idiom.”

But with a win for best picture thanks to 2021’s surprise hit Coda, Apple TV+ is hoping to keep The Greatest Beer Run Ever firmly on Academy voters’ radar.

For Farrelly, it’s the latest in a long line of road trip films – something he describes as pure coincidence.

“If you look at all my films, they’re almost entirely road trips,” he notes. “Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, There’s Something About Mary, Three Stooges, Green Book, they’re all road trips and I don’t know why.

“I lived in the same house my whole life growing up, we never moved, never went anywhere.” (“You make it up to me now!” Efron chimes in). “Maybe that’s part of it, I love road movies, but I consciously don’t really think about it.”

The film is based on the 2020 book Donohue wrote about his adventure, but the story first came to Farrelly’s desk thanks to a 12-minute YouTube documentary about the expedition that was released five years earlier.

Peter Farrelly’s last film Green Book won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2019

“The most, [Donohue] is motivated by this pure feeling of love for his friends,” says Efron.

“But he doesn’t have all the answers. He’s brave enough to just throw himself out there and implement a pretty crazy idea he had while drunk.”

Farrelly concludes, “I think there’s a lesson in this film – Vietnam was a bad war, and we didn’t know a whole other thing at first.

“It took years for the truth to emerge, and finally in the 1970s Americans started to see the reality of what this war was and it was a disaster, it was bad, it didn’t help anyone. A lot of Americans died and a lot more Vietnamese died, and that was unnecessary.”