When you pay for HBO like I did for many years, you can end up with a strange sense of entitlement.
No fourth season of “Deadwood”? Outrageous. No second season for “John From Cincinnati”? Unfathomable. Perhaps that final shot of Tony Soprano cutting to black opened a Pandora’s box of wish fulfillment when it comes to consumers of premium-cable content.
But “Entourage”? Viewers such as myself couldn’t be bothered to watch the final two or three seasons, much less be clamoring for a feature film coda.
But the economics of keeping franchises alive being what they are — think a swirling maelstrom of aging stars and warmed-over plotlines — we now have “Entourage,” the movie.
This iteration of Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) and his posse of pals is evidence enough that making the leap from small screen to multiplex isn’t difficult to do, but few have done it well.
The easy part is that we need very little exposition to understand who these guys are and what they’re about — opening the film on a yacht party in Ibiza with more undulating, barely dressed 20-something ladies than you can count is as effective in world-building for the “Entourage” universe as it is telling of the thematic depth ahead.
Not recognizing their own storytelling success, the filmmakers still indulge in piling on the exposition by reintroducing Vince, half-brother Drama (Kevin Dillon), slimmed-down Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) and E (Kevin Connolly) by way of a faux Piers Morgan TV special. At a minimum, Morgan’s status as a broadcaster of some repute confirms that, despite the proliferate cameos from the likes of real-world big shots Liam Neeson and Warren Buffett, this is absolutely a work of fiction.
But this particular venture into the world of make believe does nothing that the show didn’t do in its serialized format on HBO — save for running much longer than its old half-hour format. Take, for example, the true star of the series, Jeremy Piven’s foul-mouthed mega-agent-cum-mogul Ari Gold. He’s still winning at all costs, getting in too deep with Hollywood’s true power players and running afoul of his wife (Perrey Reeves) with his poorly contained rage.
The movie finds multiple ways to do less with more. All the guys continue to alternate between scrambling to save Vince’s latest movie project and jockeying to make wisecracks and bed beautiful women — just sans the nuance that a full season of television can provide. Relationships that would be arcs across five hours of show become subplots barely registering five minutes of screen time this time out.
A quick check of online episode recaps reveals that whatever knowledge I lacked by not watching the final seasons was rendered useless — virtually all the revelations that brought the series to a close have unraveled and left Vince’s crew right where they were for the bulk of their HBO run.
Without character development, what do you have? Certainly not what made the HBO series worth watching for those of us who’ll admit we did so. The show’s fictionalized Hollywood never decided to be a full-fledged satire, instead fashioning a ripped-from-TMZ re-appropriation of actual Tinseltown debauchery and shenanigans. It had much more in common with “Law & Order” than many dare give it credit for, replacing courtrooms and crimes of the week with drug-fueled pool parties in the Hollywood Hills.
That dynamic allowed the show — and this film version — to coast along even if the group dynamic and individual performances were lacking, as they often are.
Every now and then, the “Entourage” that ended almost four years ago managed to make some jabs at celebrity culture despite appealing in many ways to young bros who, like Vince & Co., were too turned up to be in on the joke. This time out, there’s little time for incisive looks at the entertainment industry between the lingering shots of bikini-clad babes and the requisite callbacks to the show’s most-memorable tropes and catchphrases.
But for all that is mediocre about the rehashing of old story lines and the misfires the film has in shoehorning some maturity into the mix (namely, E grappling ever so briefly with the weight of fatherhood), this “Entourage” does get something right: Haley Joel Osment steals almost every scene he graces as a Texas rich boy thrust into calling the shots at Ari’s studio on behalf of his rich Texan daddy (Billy Bob Thornton). If this movie is indeed a ship circling in a whirlpool on a sea of unnecessary remakes, sequels and TV adaptations, Osment is the first one I’d toss a life preserver.
You can rationalize “Entourage” being a halfway decent flick by couching it as simply more of what viewers came to expect for the better part of a decade on HBO. But unlike the prevailing ethos of Vince’s hedonistic ways, the party has to end at some point — and not all parties require an after-party like this.
“Entourage” is rated R. Running time: One hour, 44 minutes. Two stars out of five.