Entourage Makes Everything Seem Better Than It Is, Including Entourage
This is the last episode we wanted, but not the last episode we deserved.
There’s nothing quite like being a female reporter and attempting to defend your love of Entourage at a time when “bro” is the newest four-letter word. “But you’re not even white,” a friend texted to me after I told her I was worried about writing an unbiased review of the movie, especially given the fact that I own a collector’s edition boxed set of the eight-season show. I needn’t have worried. For someone with an infinite capacity to forgive—it’s 2015 and I still like men and network television—the movie fell short all the same. Which is really too bad, because if Entourage was ever good at any one thing, it was making everything in Hollywood, including Entourage itself, seem better than it actually was.
But as wise philosopher and sometimes disc jockey Calvin Harris solemnly intoned to Adrian Grenier’s Vince as he was about to drop the bass in a scene from the movie within a movie within an industry within an industry, “All good parties must come to an end.” And end, this party did—just with significantly less finesse than the miniscule amount of finesse Entourage’s diehard fan base (population: me) expected.
For a film whose opening scenes contain Piers Morgan conducting an interview with far more journalistic standards than his real-life career has ever contained, realism was never a goal. If that was true, Kevin Connolly’s Eric “E” Murphy would have never been deemed fuckable in the early aughts, much less where his character is now, a multi-million dollar earning producer on the cusp of his most unbelievable production yet: becoming a baby daddy to a woman out of both his league and height range (ex-girlfriend Sloan, reprised by the ever-delightful Emmanuelle Chriqui). In fact, the only realistic gambit in the entire film—a film that actually does depict Hollywood life fairly close to the hedonistic excess it once was before America started pretending Hulu was a real network—is when Kevin Dillon’s Johnny “Drama” Chase mentions drinking a cocktail made of molly and water, because, hey, we’ve all had great Mondays every now and then.
In a movie where realism and plot were always of secondary importance to the noble primary pursuit of palming bare breasts, the old standbys somehow feel stale. Vince’s face has once again been quaaluded into submission as he bungles his way through yet another multi-million dollar film disaster. Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold has all the rage of a deflated balloon, which is admittedly a fun interpretation of art imitating Piven’s real life, but not exactly what the “eight seasons and a movie” petitions had in mind, I don’t think. Drama’s contemplation of suicide gets only a five second pause, down 75% percent from the requisite twenty. E is still E, which is to say, E remains a short stump of nothing. In this changing world, it’s nice to have some constants.
But perhaps that’s what happens when roughly 32 of your 96 minutes are dedicated to having as many men as possible pronounce Emily Ratajkowski’s full name, ostensibly to prove that they can! The other 64 were a steady stream of cameos from a cadre of people who must have amateur sex tapes Warner Brothers is holding hostage in a locked vault. This was all accompanied by the sobering realization that the kid who saw dead people in The Sixth Sense is the second best actor in this entire production (rivaled only by Morgan, who I cannot impress upon you enough did a tremendous job in a role that’s entirely foreign to him: that of an actual reporter).
Entourage the film was never supposed to be great, all it had to do was be. But with cameos less humorous and breasts far less bouncy than they ever used to be, Entourage is essentially the saline implant of movies when it wouldn’t have been that much harder to go silicone. You’ll still fuck with it, sure, but does it look or feel exactly like it should? Nah.
Photos by Warner Bros.
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