I don’t drink very often. When I do though I prefer to drink good beer. Usually something imported. I won’t get into specifics because there is no accounting for tast as far as beer is concerned. Also, We don’t need a “my microbrew could beat up your microbrew” argument. Suffice to say that in the world of beer there are levels of goodness and we can almost all agree that on those levels, a Bud Light is near the bottom. But Bud Light serves a purpose too. Let’s face it, when you’re drinking just to get hammered you aren’t gonna spend the money for good beer. You’re gonna go cheap and easy. You’re gonna get a case of whatever’s on sale and go for it. Sure it doesn’t taste all that great, but with enough of it in you’re not gonna care.
Beerfest was like a six-pack of cheap beer. No taste. Just enough alcohol to get ya feelin’ good.
It’s hard not to appreciate this movie for what it set out to be. Nothing more than a bunch of dumb and crude humor. An approach the Broken Lizard guys have been taking for years, and in this one they mosly succeed. The set-up is that two brothers have to go to germany to scatter their dead grandfathers ashes. Once there they end up seeing a secret beer drinking competition called Beerfest. They end up being humiliated by the Germans and vow revenge. Once they return to America they assemble the ultimate drinking team and start training.
It’s in these training sessions that the movie starts to hit it’s stride. Almost every drinking game I’ve ever heard of and a few I haven’t gets made fun of and all of the typical “oh my god I was so wasted” stories you’ve ever heard get shown. Now, I’m not saying that you need to have some humiliating drinking experiences to enjoy the humor, but it will definitely help. The movie as a whole does rely on picking at your own experiences with alcohol to get some laughs at of you and if you don’t have many of them you won’t be able to laugh along with the movie. There is plenty of plain ol’ stupidity to go around for the rest of us though. At one point a character falls in a vat of beer and can’t swim to the top so he attempts to drink all the beer out of the vat. Dumb? Yes. Hilarious? Yes.
Beerfest is not a nice imported beer that you drink to savor the complicated the flavor. It’s a cheap domestic that you chug to get a good buzz and enjoy your evening.
8/10
