The world didn’t need an “Entourage” movie; the HBO hit about a movie star and his posse of hangers-on had its cultural moment and expired long before the series wrapped up its run in 2011.
Here we are nonetheless, reuniting with Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) and his pals Turtle (Jerry Ferrara), Eric (Kevin Connolly) and buffoonish half-brother Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon), and their tiresome obsession with fame, wealth and objectifying the opposite sex.
The material hasn’t changed over the years or in the transition in screen size: the movie, written and directed by series creator Doug Ellin, plays exactly like an extended episode of the series. There’s precious little effort made to adapt “Entourage” to a Hollywood that is evolving away from the era when bros would be bros and women existed mainly to stand around in tiny bikinis, desperate for attention. In the age of the feminist masterwork “Mad Max: Fury Road,” this is a relic.
That’s not to accuse Ellin and company of blatant sexism. There is an attempt in this movie, as there was in the series, to undercut Tinseltown stereotypes by laying bare how so much of the business consists of put-on posturing. Smarmy agent (turned studio head in the movie) Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) screams and hurls insults so loudly and with such frequency that he’d put Alec Baldwin’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” bigwig to shame, but somewhere beneath the invective is an actual, three-dimensional person.
Beyond seeming stale, the satire is flimsy; too often the movie luxuriates in the depravity to such an extent that the broader perspective is lost. The film follows Vince as Ari hands him the reins to direct a major tentpole sci-fi movie, as well as the usual subplots involving the rest of the ensemble. Cameos ensue. It’s slick and ultimately meaningless — in other words, exactly what you’d expect.
