Entourage review: These boys won't be turning into men anytime soon. Yay!

By Tanul Thakur

At one point in the TV series Entourage’s final season, movie star Vince Chase (Adrian Grenier), after being rejected by a Vanity Fair journalist, wonders about his relationship with women. “She said, ‘You are not very deep’,” he tells his friend and manager E (Kevin Connolly), one of the three friends in Vince’s entourage. “Yeah, but you already knew that,” E replies. E might as well have been talking about the TV series—an easy-going, fun show about boys trapped in the frame of men, constantly avoiding the ultimate life turn: growing up. The show ended on an agreeable, pleasing note—in fact, a little too agreeable (read: convenient)—but it still remained likeable, largely because we knew the characters well.

[caption id=“attachment_2303658” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Entourage. Facebook[/caption]

The movie version of Entourage begins on a note that completely betrays its finale. Nearly every convenient plot point in the final episode is undone—Vince’s marriage doesn’t last more than nine days, and he’s back to his philandering ways. Sloan (Emmanuelle Chriqui) breaks up with E, who has—surprise!—moved on. Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven), similarly, returns to Hollywood (now no longer as an agent, but the head of a movie studio) after spending just a few weeks in Italy with his family. All this points towards the fact that these men are still… boys. They haven’t grown up and they haven’t changed. Their transformation towards the series’ end was just a hurried attempt to wrap up the show. So ten minutes into the show, we know that what happened on TV was just a hurried attempt to wrap up the show and sitting here, watching the film, you have two choices: either forget the series’ finale or the movie. Because there’s no way that the two Entourages can meet and make sense.

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This reviewer chose to remain with the film and my initial reservation about its amateurish start slowly began to wane. It soon becomes clear that Doug Ellin, the show’s creator and the film’s director, still knows his characters and the dynamics shared by them. Ari, the star of the show and this film, is always just one moment away from a meltdown that is both endearing and hilarious. Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon), Vince’s elder (half) brother, is still paranoid, narcissistic and insecure.

A few characters, however, have changed in some unexpected ways — E is no longer the stuck-up conservative Queens’ lad. Turtle (Jerry Ferrara), buoyed by his own financial success, no longer depends on Vince. Vince is directing a futuristic movie called Hyde that has been bankrolled by Ari’s studio. There’s just enough different in Entourage the film to keep you interested in the movie’s ultimate outcome.

Plus, the jokes keep flying: Ari’s acerbic one-liners, Johnny’s not-so-clever repartee reflecting his inner angst, the banter between Turtle and Johnny. We are in familiar territory now, dawdling through similar scenes and set ups that made the TV series so popular.

The movie’s depiction of its female characters and the jokes at their expense do tend to cross the line at times, but that was a feature of TV series too. Yet you did get the feeling that the TV series, by reducing its peripheral female characters to “eye candy”, was cheekily reflecting Hollywood’s long-standing gender bias. From time to time, an odd woman popped up in Entourage whom the boys couldn’t wind around their little finger. The universe of the film, though, is less encouraging towards women. The few scenes with women support Hollywood’s troubling, gender-biased worldview, but as distasteful as that might be, it’s a fact that such people exist.

Despite its divorce from the TV show, Entourage is quite clearly a movie for the fans of the show. Ellin doesn’t waste time fleshing out the film’s characters, so if you’re unfamiliar with the show, you’ll tune out quickly. The film, in its final act, shares the sloppiness of the series’ finale. Here, too, one of the threads in the climax appears too convenient and cute (even bordering on being manipulative). The central conflict is a terrible cop-out and resolved way too easily.

Still, anyone who has loved the show will find it difficult not to warm up to the film, which essentially revolves around the same territory as the show and, just like its characters, hasn’t grown up. Entourage, for the most part, is a delightful repetition. This is Doug Ellin and Mark Wahlberg being as generous as they can: a cool $27.5 million spent on more of the same, for fans who don’t mind enjoyable fluff once in a while.