Friendo: “Watched Greatest Beer Run Ever, and found it merely okay. The problem is not the actors but the whole concept. Not sure how ‘true’ the actual story is…I mean did the real Chickie get some kind of hard lessons in Vietnam?
“I’d imagined this to be some kind of MASH-style satire but it was deadly earnest and I’m sorry but you’re right about one thing — the scope of this film exceeded Peter Farrelly’s grasp. Russell Crowe is actually very good and I liked Zac Efron but the film is too long and its history-lesson preaching is outdated, obvious, and too broad to stick. A barely passable time-waster but nothing to write home about.”
HE to Friendo: As I understand it the real Chickie gradually became skeptical about the Vietnam War, but he didn’t return home an abruptly changed man. His beer-run adventure was the beginning of his consciousness-raising, but not the all of it.