A few days ago I heard about a 3.31 Orange County research screening for Peter Farrelly‘s The Greatest Beer Run Ever (Apple +). I heard nothing about how it played. The screening indicates, of course, that the film will open later this year, probably in the fall.

The Apple TV + release is a true-life Vietnam War drama (layered with a little dramedy here and there?), based on the same-titled 2020 book by John “Chickie” Donohue and Joanna Molloy.

I’ve read Donohue and Molloy’s book, and it’s quite the episodic journey — an apolitical adventure about the Vietnam War and being in harm’s way with Donohue, the lead protagonist (Zac Efron), somehow making his way through all the dangers and red tape and whatnot.

The book reads like a kind of working-class love story — a saga about 20something guys who were serving (or had served) in the Vietnam War during the mid to late ’60s…a time when many in the antiwar left were professing hate or contempt for soldiers for bringing all kinds of horror to the lives of Vietnamese citizens (i.e., My Lai).

If Farrelly’s film follows the tone and attitude of the book, The Greatest Beer Run Ever will not — repeat, not — bear much resemblance to Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, Da 5 Bloods or any other high-profile Vietnam flick that comes to mind.

When I think of the Vietnam War, I think of the furies swirling around and howling in the ears of those bigwigs who sent 58,000 men to their deaths. The book certainly isn’t channelling any kind of guilt-trip narrative. It stays with Donohue’s perspective start to finish, and doesn’t really deal with the war in any kind of Oliver Stone sense. It’s about the perspective of soldiers who were just trying to survive, and who probably felt little if any allegiance for U.S military objectives at the time.

Set in 1967 and early ’68, the book is Donohue’s first-hand account (he was 26 at the time) of having decided to use his ex-Marine and merchant seaman credentials to get over to Vietnam and somehow track down his buddies and tell them they’re loved by the gang back home and bring them a case of two of beer as tokens of same.

Donohue’s message in a nutshell: “Don’t let the antiwar left get you down, bruhs. We know you’re living through hell but we want you to know that we care about you, and here’s a brewski to prove it.”

Donohue (now just past 80) was too old to feel the antiwar thing. People born in 1941 were much closer to the 1930s Baby Bust generation than to boomers, and Donohue, stamped with the values of the blue-collar neighborhood he grew up in, hadn’t been impacted by campus anti-war sentiments, or at least was unpersuaded. He had a kind of old-schoolish, semi-traditional attitude about military service.

Besides Efron-as-Donohue, the film costars Russell Crowe and Bill Murray. The Beer Run screenplay is by Farrelly, Brian Hayes Currie and Pete Jones.

We all know Joanna Molloy, the book’s co-author, as the co-author (along with husband George Rush) of “Rush & Molloy“, the famous N.Y. Daily News gossip column. Jett interned for George and Joanna during the summer of ’05.

Boilerplate synopsis: “In 1967, John Donohue was a 26-year-old U.S. Marine Corps veteran working as a merchant seaman when he was challenged one night in a New York City bar. The men gathered had lost family and friends in the ongoing war in Vietnam. One friend proposed an idea many might deem preposterous: one of them should sneak into Vietnam, track down their buddies in combat, and give each of them messages of support from back home, maybe some laughs, and beer.”

Your intuitions about how The Greatest Beer Run Ever will be received are as good as anyone’s. But we know that the critics who hated Farrelly’s Green Book and who were infuriated when it won the Best Picture Oscar in early ’19…we know those guys are going to be gunning for Farrelly and this movie no matter what.

I was overjoyed when Green Book won the top prize. I felt doubly euphoric, in fact, while thinking about how angry the Green Book haters must have been about this.