Entourage
Director: Brad Bird
Starring: Adrian Grenier, Kevin Connolly, Jerry Ferrara
104 mins; Class 15;
KRS Releasing Ltd

A little background for those un-familiar with Entourage. It started life as an HBO comedy that aired from 2004 and 2011.

It followed the life of Vince Chase (Adrian Grenier) and his entourage – friends and family who accompanied him to Hollywood from their Queens, New York home.

These include his manager Eric Murphy (Kevin Connolly), his half-brother Johnny aka Drama (Kevin Dillon), and friend Salvatore ‘Turtle’ Assante (Jerry Ferrara); while Vince is managed by super-agent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven).

The series took a light, satirical look at the excesses, highs and lows of the celebrity lifestyle.

During its 96-episode run, the series remained hugely popular with critics and audiences alike, winning numerous awards, including six Emmys.

And here, four years after the final episode aired, is the big-screen adaptation which diehard fans of the show will possibly give a warmer welcome to than newcomers.

For, to be brutally honest, based on what unfolds on screen, what was so great about the series completely eludes me.

The film opens a few days after events of the final episode of the series, and we find Eric, Johnny and Turtle lounging on a speedboat that is skimming along the Ibiza coast toward a luxury yacht on which Vince is spending his honeymoon… although the marriage has ended after only six days and Vince is celebrating this event with a huge party.

In those same six days Ari has come out of retirement as an agent to become a studio head.

We learn all this with a helpful bit of exposition courtesy of a sequence in which journalist and talk show host Piers Morgan (as himself) is presenting a documentary about Vince, and thus fills us all in on his life and that of his entourage.

This does go a long way in introducing us newbies to the concept, but does little to endear us to the characters. What follows feels like nothing more than an overlong, pointless and rather humourless episode of the show.

I honestly believe that at this point it is safe to say that the well of comedy based on men-behaving-badly tropes has clearly run dry and Entourage is the latest example of that aridity.

It never develops beyond anything more than a series of scenes following a group of obnoxious, spoiled men with a plot that never quite takes off and, as continues to be the norm, a healthy disregard for the women.

Having never seen an episode of the show, I can’t comment on whether the characters as presented in the movie have evolved at all from when they started life all those years ago. If they actually have, I shudder to think what they may have been like then.

The plot, such as it is, centres on Vince’s attempts to get more financing for his high-budget, high-concept directorial debut.

Never comes together

In the meantime, Eric’s womanising gets him into trouble; Turtle’s attempts to get a date come to naught; and the rather dim Drama’s intense desire to finally be taken seriously as an actor continue unabated.

But all these never come together to make a cohesive whole, with the whole padded out by a plethora of oh-look-who’s-here cameos from various celebrities, including Mark Wahlberg, on whom the original series was very loosely based.

The only moments worth savouring feature Piven’s abrasive Ari, struggling struggles to keep his composure and his calm, as he flounders in his new job.

There’s alsoHaley Joel ‘Sixth Sense’ Osment as Travis, the son of studio head Larsen McCredle (Billy Bob Thornton).

Osment is unrecognisable, yet he truly nails the role as the spoiled, envious and trouble-making little rich kid.

I expected Entourage to be more of a satire. Yet, if there is a satirical bent to this I clearly missed it, for rather than spotlighting these guys’ excessive behaviour and exposing it to ridicule, the film seems to be going out of its way to celebrate it.

To add insult to injury it presents the majority of its female characters in a rather bad light, the women being nothing more than stereotypes; the patient wife, pregnant ex-girlfriend, current angry girlfriend and a dizzying display of scantily-clad starlets on hand merely as props.

You can imagine my delight when Ronda Jean Rousey, a mixed-martial artist and actress also playing herself, chucks Turtle across a ring and locks him in a deathly grip.

Oh, had she done that to the entire entourage, the film would have been so much funnier.