Review: ‘Entourage’

Do you have to be a fan of the original “Entourage” HBO television series in order to enjoy the “Entourage” movie? Yeah most likely, or else you won’t understand who these characters are or why they do what they do. But will being a fan of the show guarantee that you will like the movie version? That depends on how low you set your bar for cinematic expectations. Because “Entourage” the movie is just an overly long, low stakes, lightweight episodic installment of the first world problems of people who are absurdly rich and hugely successful already.

In the television show, we started out with movie star to be Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) and his “entourage” of friends and they started out at the bottom, with minimal credits and experience and a long shot at “making it.” Over the course of eight seasons, they clawed their way to the top, and along with Vince’s agent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven), they all became hugely successful one way or another, got what they wanted, and ended the show on top of their respective worlds. Vince is a huge movie star and gets married, his best friend and manager Eric (Kevin Connolly) has a successful agency, his brother Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon) followed up two runs on successful shows with yet another successful show, Vince’s driver Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) has become a tequila millionaire, and Vince’s agent Ari has enough money to retire in Italy with his wife.

And now here comes the movie, in which the central hook of the story is how Vince was given $100 million to direct and star in a movie, he went over budget by $15 million, and he needs another $8 million. What drama! On the side, Eric has to deal with the problem of sleeping with too many beautiful women within a 24 hour period (the horror!), Turtle courts Rhonda Rousey (so compelling!), Ari has anger issues again (shock!) and Johnny Drama still feels like he needs to validate his career yet again (how original!), and it all comes across as the perils of being a one-percenter, people who have so much wealth and success that they forgot what real problems looked like and instead mope while lounging poolside at their villa while their bank accounts continue to swell. This movie even goes so far as to point out that Johnny Drama has managed to get cast in bit parts in just about everything, included as a voice actor in animated stuff, and yet somehow his career still needs to be validated and he’s crashing at his brother’s place? Makes no sense.

The main “story,” so to speak, features Ari as a studio president (that Italian retirement was ridiculously short lived, along with Vince’s marriage from the final season the show) dealing with the studio’s co-financier, a Texan oilman named Larsen (Billy Bob Thornton); Larsen is the guy that extra $8 million would be coming from, and Ari has to ask for it on behalf of Vince, and Larsen doesn’t want to give it up without his son Travis (Haley Joel Osment) getting to view a cut of Vince’s movie and giving his own artistic seal of approval. And when Travis sees the movie and is the only person to not like it, Ari has to deal with the fallout. As a result, Ari is the only character in this movie who feels like there is actually any possible consequence to this movie. Vince tackles the whole thing with such a laid back attitude that it is impossible to see the failure of this movie as a big deal to him. Hell, at one point he brings back his old mantra of “we can always go back to Queens,” meaning he has so much money who gives a shit? No one wants to give him work? He’ll take his ball and go home because he can. Must be nice.

Besides Ari trying to keep his new found job as studio prez, Johnny Drama gets the most dramatic action through his quest to finally be a “respected” actor, which he hopes a small yet pivotal role in Vince’s movie will get him, and in the meantime he is still auditioning for stuff and has angst about not making it, despite the fact that he has clearly made it. And this might as well be considered a spoiler but trust me on this one that this movie was never going to surprise you in any way, shape or form, but the fact that “Entourage” ends with Vince and Johnny getting their artistic value validated by that vainglorious hunk of garbage award show known as the Golden Globes just kind of bolsters the whole idea that the people behind this movie don’t really get it. The Golden Globes is a joke, invented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in order to gain access to actors and studios for their journalists, and has no artistic value whatsoever – for example, the Golden Globes nominated the movie “The Tourist” for best comedy just so they could get Johnny Depp to show up to the award show and hence on television in order to increase ratings in order to be able to charge more for advertising dollars – and seeing this as the ending of the movie, the big triumphant moment, shows us the shallowness of this movie.

Good storytelling is a series of hard choices and resultant consequences and how those consequences reverberate with the characters. When “Entourage” was a television show, there was a sense of drama during most the series, as their initial choices could have resulted in their careers not really taking off, and even down the line when Vince got bored and started living a more reckless lifestyle that was directly affecting him and his career, there was actual drama, with some consequences. Even as a show, “Entourage” had a tendency to just write solutions in that fixed everything for everyone – think Martin Scorsese calling Vince out of nowhere to offer him a job when no one else would, or Turtle just falling ass backwards into a start up tequila company and then just happening to meet Mark Cuban, who just happens to be ready to drop $5 million on some schmuck with a Yankees fitted cap and the dream of being an alcohol mogul – but this movie has even fewer consequences to what the characters do. Everyone just gets away with everything and nothing bad happens to anyone.

For example, there is Eric, whose entire story in this movie is about how he wants to help ex-girlfriend Sloan (Emmanuelle Chriqui) raise their baby while simultaneously playing the field. He sleeps with two attractive women in one day, and then the next day Sloan is all like “I’m pregnant and no one will touch me” and he’s all like “I’ll bang ya, no emotions, it’ll be fun,” and yet we’re supposed to like this guy. Throughout the whole series and here in the movie, Eric is the fresh-faced, wide-eyed nice guy, so even when he becomes a womanizer, he’s as innocent as possible about the whole thing, and when he gets called out on it by each woman, he doesn’t really learn any lessons, there are no real consequences, and he even turns it all around on Sloan and is like “no, YOU have to get over me being a cheater” and she’s all like “oh okay, you’re right, I’m just a stupid girl.” We’re supposed to cheer this guy on? He’s an asshole, and worse, doesn’t think he’s one and for some reason, neither does the movie. His innocent charm of the first few seasons of the show has turned into a case of hyper obliviousness, to the point where Eric will probably wake up one day wearing an Ed Hardy t-shirt and Von Dutch hat without realizing it and he’ll just walk around bro-ing people without a hint of irony or knowing.

Now, to be fair, the second of the two chicks Eric had sex with was at a party, and at this party he drank a bottle of water that was dosed by Johnny Drama with molly and Viagra, so when he slept with the second girl, he was unwittingly under the influence of pharmaceutical drugs, which were given to him without his knowledge by someone professing to be his friend. And this dosing is never brought up again. By that I mean, Eric never finds out his was drugged (and for some reason doesn’t suspect it), and Johnny Drama never confesses to doing it, and when Eric gets let off the hook consequence-free for sleeping with this chick, that means there is literally no fall out from this action. So, I must ask, what the fuck is this movie saying? That this is cool? It’s okay for bros to drug other bros in the name of getting them laid? What if this sexual liaison then turns into a pregnancy or transmittance of an STD? Will that same bro then help with the expense of raising a child or the pain of living with a disease? How is this moment even part of this movie and why is it presented this way? So then Johnny Drama is set up as one of the few sympathetic characters in the main entourage grouping, and he is also the most despicable for pulling shit like this.

And to push this lack of consequences even further, at one point Johnny Drama gets busted having a sexy video chat with some random chick by the chick’s boyfriend, and he’s all like “I’m gonna get you!” and eventually he releases masturbation videos of Johnny Drama to TMZ, and everyone in Hollywood is laughing at him and watching the videos and he becomes an instant joke and he’s freaking out and then…he finds out that Sloan is having the baby and he’s literally like “Everything’s cool, I gotta go, my half-brother’s best friend’s baby mama is having her baby and this doesn’t bother me anymore” and then after the kid is born, IMMEDIATELY cut to their movie being a hit and Johnny is on top of the world and that’s it with the jealous boyfriend – leaked video subplot. Again, it ends free of consequence.

Nothing in the movie matters. In a movie loaded with nudity and sex and which apparently had to be cut down from an NC-17 to an R rating, Vince has an incredibly chaste courtship of model/actress Emily Ratajkowski for two or three scenes, and at once point she asks him if she should tell her publicist if they are dating (because the publicist is asking for this information) and Vince is all like “Yeah, sure, I dunno, tell him whatever.” Again, he couldn’t give less of a shit about anything. What compelling drama! And Turtle’s courtship of Rhonda Rousey could have been the subplot of one episode of “Entourage” and here is stretched out to movie length. And it is not interesting and has an unsatisfying ending. Oh, and that $8 million needed to finish Vince’s movie? At one point Turtle offers to put up the full $8 million and Eric and Vince offer to split the cost themselves, and for some reason they are told its not about that. But that’s not what I took away from this scene. What I took away was a roomful of millionaires sitting around talking about how they can just go ahead and spend their millions, while another millionaire tells them that they don’t need THEIR millions, they need the millions from a Texan BILLIONAIRE. Again…we’re supposed to care about this shit?

Here’s the deal. When “Entourage” was on television, it spent most of it’s run in the halcyon days before The Great Recession that hit in 2008. Back then, it was cool to sit around and get lost in a half-hour-a-week, male driven soap opera about obtaining and spending wealth (through the guise of watching people succeed in Hollywood) because we the audience members could dream along with them and be like “yeah it would be cool to be super rich one day, we can all live the American Dream.” But the world economy collapsed, jobs were lost by the millions, the people who caused this collapse got away with it without suffering any consequences and the average citizen was left holding the bill. And in the subsequent slow recovery of this economy, the wealth gap has widened to historic levels, the Occupy movement was born, and income inequality has become a major issue in this world, which means 2015 is not the time to make a movie about a movie star licking his failed marital wounds on a yacht filled with naked women in the waters of Ibiza, Spain, while his equally rich friends sit around wondering how to spend their money.

When Ari buys a surely super expensive car for Vince as a gift, a car that Vince could easily afford and which he would never drive because he doesn’t drive, it just hammers home the point the “Entourage” movie is just about as out of touch as it gets. We are no longer escaping into a possible dream come true, and instead we are just being reminded that the one-percent lives a very different life than the rest of us. And “Entourage” does this in the same way Johnny Drama drugs one of his friends, without a hint of remorse or fear of consequence, with an attitude that says “this will be the coolest ever,” and really it just comes across as the most douche bro thing ever.

Fuck this movie.