The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022)

The film concerns John "Chickie" Donohue, a merchant seaman who in 1967 sails to Vietnam to hand-deliver Pabst Blue Ribbon to his neighborhood friends. Peter Farrelly directs with the earnestness of a man assembling a tribute. The project carries all the ingredients of a prestige memorial, and the critical reception was mixed, which is a polite way of saying the beer arrived flat.

The cast is white, and remains white. Vietnamese figures appear, notably Hieu, and they are handled with baseline decency, though they stay scenery for the lead's moral education. No casting agenda announces itself. There is a sister, Christine, who opposes the war loudly, and the film grants her a few minutes before returning to the boys. The narrative belongs to male camaraderie, and it has no interest in interrogating that arrangement.

Where the film does carry a message, it is the old anti-war message, and it lands with the soft thud of a lesson learned late. Chickie arrives a supporter and departs a skeptic, having witnessed a CIA interrogation, a covered-up embassy breach, and a friend's death. The film implies the embassy attack was an inside job, a bolder claim than the material can support, and it plays as conventional wartime disillusionment instead of any modern re-reading of history. There are cynical notes about the war machine, but the target is deception, not economics, so the rich keep their seats.

This is a 2022 film that could have been made in 1989 and fit comfortably. It shows no interest in the contemporary vocabulary of social consciousness, and it offers no sermon beyond the one every Vietnam picture offers. That restraint is almost quaint. The result is a modest, well-meaning picture about a man carrying beer through a war, which is either charming or thin, depending on how thirsty you are.