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an everyman decides to cheer up his buddies fighting in VietNam by taking them some local beer (Pabst). Zach Efron is believable in playing the good old boy, and Russell Crowe, as a cynical but unbiased reporter, steals every scene he is in.
I must confess that one reason I watched this film is that it got bad reviews from the critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but the viewers gave it a 90 percent.
This was a signal that the film was not PC, probably because it didn't denigrate the US soldier. It portrayed the ordinary Yank as decent but depressed at the craziness of the war. People forget that it was the ones they now call "deplorable" who fought the war, and a lot of the bitterness against the elite can be traced to this polarization over Vietnam, where the elite left saw every flaw in the Americans but ignored the the terrible atrocities of the Vietcong which hinted at the genocides and ethnic cleansing that happened after they took over.
In the film, our good old boy discovers that war is hell:
But it also shows the importance of community and friendship in the working class neighborhoods who sent many of their sons to fight the war.
The film suceeds because it doesn't preach a lot of nonsense, but just shows how he learned this lesson. And a reminder to the cheerleaders of war: even just wars are hell.
I give it a 3 out of 4 stars.
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this is the short film that inspired the movie:
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