‘Entourage’ Review: Overlong and irrelevant

Underneath the hubris of Hollywood privilege that Doug Ellin’s Entourage overexploits is a decent movie about the madness that is movie-making. Sadly, Ellin’s expansion of the television show to silver screen proportions is too much like its TV brother, meaning, it’s a whole lot of yacking and not a lot of thinking. In the end, the film does not achieve anything more than being an overextended bore.

The gang’s back, reunited aboard a yacht full of half-naked ladies. Vince Chase (Adrian Grenier) is celebrating his divorce but is in some sort of spiritual rut, which can only be solved by a new creative outlet. Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven), his ex-manager turned studio head, wants him to star in a big budget film. Vince is in, with just one condition. He also wants to direct it. 

 

A bad film within a bad film 

A few months later, he needs more money to finish the film. Ari is forced to visit his Texas financier (Billy Bob Thornton) who is fine with shelling out a few more millions as long as Ari brings his manchild of a son (Haley Joel Osment) to Hollywood to be his eyes and ears. This is basically where the conflict starts. Ari loves the film. The spoiled son doesn’t. Vince and his gang are all stuck in the middle. 

The best thing about Entourage is how it portrays the Hollywood movie-making machine as a caricature. Hyde, Vince’s film, is awful, at least from the bits that we see. Its special effects-laden and slow motioned action scenes do not make sense, and look more garish and grueling than your typical blockbuster. The lengths the boardroom producers go through to either salvage or dispose of the film expose the type of politicking that is invisible to the consumers’ eyes. 

It is this dynamic that could have made Entourage a more interesting film, had it been laced with cynicism. However, that facet of the film is merely played for laughs. It is the core to the comedy that does not work because frankly, the show’s humor is outdated, overtaken by a culture that has witnessed things that are more bizarre than up-and-coming stars and their entourage of leeches and lechers.

Stagnant characters

Ellin never bothers to update the characters of the show. Vince is still a pretty wallflower, with nothing to do in the film but to prance around with not a sliver of motivation. He is a boring protagonist, a vanilla-flavored central character whose conflict is not so much a conflict as it is a self-solving plot device.

His entourage, which aims to be the point of this pointless exercise, does not fare any better. There’s Eric (Kevin Connolly), Vince’s best bud whom he appoints as his film’s producer. His being stuck in that dark place between being a father to his unborn child and Hollywood’s undeserving lothario seems to be the film’s bankrupt moral center. 

Ari struggles with the stress of running a studio and staying loyal to Vince and his entourage. Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) is slim, rich, and gunning for Ronda Rousey. Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon) is still trying to make it to Hollywood. There is really nothing new here, which would have been fine if the show hasn’t been rendered repetitive and lackluster by stubbornly refusing to graduate its characters from their perpetual state of immaturity.

Overlong and irrelevant

Instead of giving Entourage a new lease on relevance, Ellin simply proves why Vince and his gang’s escapades are nothing but relics of a not-so-glorious past. The film is overlong and overindulgent, with a lot of its self-referential jokes and gags feeling more than a little bit out of place in a world that has developed more wit and sense through the years. – Rappler.com 

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema. Profile photo by Fatcat Studios