Producers: David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Andrew Muscato and Jake Myers   Director: Peter Farrelly   Screenplay: Peter Farrelly, Brian Currie, Pete Jones   Cast: Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, Bill Murray, Kyle Allen, Jake Picking, Will Ropp, Archie Renaux, Christopher Reed Brown, Kevin K. Tran, Joe Adler, MacGregor Arney, Matt Cook, Kristin Carey, Paul Adelstein, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, Will Hochman, Hal Cumpston and Omari K. Chancellor    Distributor: Apple+

Grade: C

Since parting ways with his brother Bobby as a writing-directing team, Peter Farrelly has veered away from over-the-top farce to dramedies with a message.  The decision worked well for him in 2018 when “Green Book,” took home the Best Picture Oscar.  Though it struck some as a decidedly dated, rather simplistic take on U.S. race relations in the early sixties, the film was an unabashedly uplifting crowd-pleaser bolstered by two expert lead performances by Mahershala Ali as jazz pianist Don Shirley and Viggo Mortensen as the chauffeur who learns the evils of prejudice as they drive through the Deep South, overcoming his own in the process. 

In his feature follow-up, Farrelly embraces a similar historically-based formula, moving ahead about half a decade to 1968.  Adapted from a 2021 memoir by John “Chick” Donohue (and J. T. Molloy), it recounts another travel-based learning experience—this time of a young man, blindly supportive of the U.S. mission in Vietnam, who discovers the truth about the war, obscured by government misinformation, when he makes a totally unauthorized—and, most would say, reckless–trip to deliver New York brewskies to his neighborhood buddies in the army there as a sign of the locals’ support.

Donohue (Zac Efron), a former Marine, decides on the trip while staying with his parents during a hiatus in his job with the Merchant Marine.  Encouraged by gung-ho veteran The Colonel (Bill Murray), the owner of his favorite bar, and most of his drinking buddies (only ne, played by Christopher Reed Brown, obviously has some doubts about the war), Chickie, as his pals call him, decides to hop on a Merchant Marine ship going to ‘Nam and hand each of the five local guys deployed there a can of The Colonel’s beer.  He’s egged on by the dismissive treatment of his dad (Paul Adelstein), who considers him a lazy layabout, and the discovery that his sister (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) is involved in peace marches he considers a disloyal impediment to the war effort.

Chickie gets to Vietnam with surprising ease, though he has to lie to his captain to be allowed to go ashore.  Misunderstanding the danger of the situation there—he thinks he can just hitchhike around—he bumps into the first of the guys he’s looking for, Tommy Collins (Archie Renaux), at a camp in Saigon.  But from there his search gets progressively more harrowing.  When he shows up in a combat zone where another of his pals Rick Duggan (Jake Picking) is stationed, he actually comes under fire.  And getting out—with the help of fellows like Lt. Habershaw (Matt Cook), who as soon as they hear him describe himself as a tourist automatically believe he’s a CIA man—he comes face-to-face with the dark side of American policy in the person of an actual Agency operative. 

That sends him fleeing into the jungle, where he barely avoids an elephant stampede and is rescued by the serendipitous arrival another of his buddies, Kevin McLoone (Will Ropp)—small world, indeed—who helps him get back to Saigon.  There he finds Kyle Allen (Bobby Pappas) in the infirmary of an ammo depot that’s just been attacked in the start of the Tet Offensive, and learns that the fifth man he’s looking for, Tommy Minogue (Will Hochman), has been killed in battle.  The reality of Tet forces Chickie to accept the fact that what newsmen like Look photographer Arthur Coates (Russell Crowe) have told him since he first arrived—that the U.S. government is lying about what a catastrophe the war has become—is true.  He extricates himself from Vietnam only with difficulty, returning home with a much changed view of the conflict, one that parallels the shift Walter Cronkite expressed on air at roughly the same time, which even LBJ recognized as a decisive turning point in public opinion. 

Farrelly pulled off a combination of comedy and drama quite deftly in “Green Book,” but here his handling of the mixture is unsteady.  The opening sequences set in Inwood, the Manhattan neighborhood where the Donohues live, are very broad (like the accents, which curiously sound more Bostonian than New Yorker), and the darkening of the mood is handled inconsistently, with Chickie remaining almost incredibly oblivious to the danger he’s put himself into until suddenly confronted with an atrocity he can’t ignore.  (When one of his pals says that he’s a good guy, but none too smart, the observation is all too accurate.)  Efron occasionally seems lost as to how to play a given scene as a result, especially when the choice of a song to accompany that atrocity—one of many period pieces employed on the soundtrack—feels misjudged.

And when the picture reaches its final act, the heavy-handedness becomes oppressive.  Although Crowe gives the photojournalist a convincing world-weariness that Chickie initially thinks no more than cynicism but comes to understand as realism, an episode involving a friendly Saigon policeman (Kevin K. Tran), even if it happened, is made crushingly manipulative, and a back-home meeting with Tommy’s mother (Kristin Carey), meant to be moving, instead comes across as maudlin.          

Efron is tasked with carrying the story pretty much on his own and manages fairly well, but the rest of the cast, including Crowe, is certainly capable, with Murray, who worked with Farrelly more than a quarter-century ago in “Kingpin,” almost unrecognizable as the gruff barkeep.  Cinematographer Sean Porter and production designer Tim Galvin both worked with the director on “Green Book,” and repeat their solid work for him on this mostly Thailand-shot piece as well (the Inwood scenes were shot in New Jersey).  Another “Book” alum is editor Patrick J. Don Vito, who can’t keep the film from being episodic but cuts each episode well; together with Galvin, costumer Bao Tranchi captures the period unobtrusively.

Overall there’s an earnestness to the movie that’s rather endearing, but Farrelly and Efron don’t manage to meld its disparate elements into a satisfying whole.