Film Review: It is Best to Steer Clear of This ‘Entourage’

Submitted by PatrickMcD on June 3, 2015 - 2:59pm

CHICAGO – I actually did watch the HBO show this big-screen iteration is based on, and I looked back in surprise to find the show actually lasted for 8 years. That’s a long time for a show that peaked in season two, and petered out into irrelevance somewhere around season four or so.

Rating: 2.0/5.0

“Entourage” the movie stubbornly offers the audiences who do show up exactly what they came for. It’s even structured like a TV episode, with a callback to the show’s opening credits. It’s back not because the creators have a great story to tell, or even because audiences wanted to hang out with the characters for a little longer.

It seems especially like an ego-stroking exercise to show off creators Doug Ellin and Mark Wahlberg’s bulging celebrity contact list. While every Entourage episode has indulged in gratuitous celebrity cameos, the ones here are of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them variety. And they’re used to depressingly little effect – Wahlberg spends his own cameo screen time plugging other projects, and Liam Neeson wears a sneer of embarrassment. If you’re going to rope in Warren Buffett and Pharrell, at least give them something to do.

The action picks up just days after the events of the series finale, and before you can say bromance, it hits the reset button. Vince (Adrian Grenier) is back to being a vacuous movie star who’s just going through the motions with a minimum of effort, and Ari (Jeremy Piven) is back screaming obscenities into a cell phone. Now, Ari is a newly-minted studio head, and he puts Vince in his next movie. But for the sake of some artificial tension, and the film’s wafer thin wisp of a plot, Vince wants to direct.

“Entourage” opens everywhere on June 3rd. Featuring Adrian Grenier, Kevin Connolly. Jerry Ferrara, Kevin Dillon, Jeremy Piven, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Billy Bob Thornton and Haley Joel Osment. Screenplay written and directed by Doug Ellin. Rated “R”