The Greatest Beer Run Ever ★★★

Peter Farrelly

Starring Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, Kyle Allen, Bill Murray, Jake Picking, Will Ropp

From the director of There's Something About Mary, Dumb & Dumber, and most recently academy award winning Green Book, comes a true story about a man who tries to deliver some beers to his friends serving in the Vietnam war.

It's good to know the back catalogue of director Peter Farrelly in this instance, as the movie itself has been injected with the light humour of his earlier work, with the nuance and calm of Green Book. It walks the line of humour and gravity pretty well and for the most part this feels like a caper more than a true story.

The cast also has a big part to play in this, with Zac Efron doing a great job in holding everything together. What starts off as a man wandering from war zone to war zone with little consequence, slowly becomes a sobering look at the realities of this divisive period in US history. Efron walks this tightrope well, going from charmingly naïve to realising his naivety effortlessly.

Inevitably, the movie goes on to comment on the politics of the Vietnam war, a theme that has been revisited time and time again. It is all fairly surface level here, with most of the action being too lighthearted for the serious elements to have the impact that was desired.

All in all, this is worth a watch, and shows once again that Apple are here to make quality movies with broad appeal.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever available now on Apple TV+