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'Entourage' Review: Harmless Mediocrity

By Alexander Joenks | Film | June 5, 2015 |

By Alexander Joenks | Film | June 5, 2015 |


I am so incredibly disappointed right now. I have never seen a single minute of the television show Entourage, but I’ve heard how monumentally douchey it is. I’ve been looking forward to seeing the movie all week, because I have a deep sickness. Because while I love seeing good films, I absolutely live for annihilating bad ones. And so I’ve been shadowboxing with it all week, all the rants I was going to throw at it once I actually saw the movie, all the written takedowns that would leave the film’s entrails scattered along twelve miles of Internet interstate. This was going to be a masterpiece of cutting rage, so intellectually eviscerating that it would be a violation of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

And it all dissipated over the course of two hours. All that carefully cultivated potential anger, wafting away.

It’s not a good movie, but it’s a mildly entertaining couple of hours of harmless mediocrity. No, it’s not worth going out to see in a theater, but if there’s nothing else on in six months and you come across it while flipping channels and land on HBO, it’s better than the other sixty channels of reality television that are the options.

Considering that a solid 15% or so of movies that I go see to review don’t even pass basic muster of film production (I’m looking at you Hercules, Paul Blart, and Getaway, just as a few examples), it’s hard to get too riled up about a film that actually manages to have characters, a story that goes from point A to point B even if not particularly interestingly, and ties it up with humor. Whether that humor is particularly funny or not, at least the jokes meet the dictionary definition of what a joke is (yes I’m still looking at you Paul fucking Blart).

I know, I know, low standards.

But even if it’s not a bad movie on a technical level, it can still be an abomination when it comes to message, right? Well if a film doesn’t have a message or statement of any kind, there’s just not anything to get angry about. There’s no angle to get your rage fingers wrapped around and peel apart.

This is a movie about some poor kids who got Hollywood lucky and now have rich white people problems while they try to get laid and make movies. The movie is fueled by about sixty cameos from actors playing themselves, and the central plot is about trying to get the extra funds to finish their movie, which it turns out is actually well-done, award-winning, et cetera. The characters’ problems are neither relatable nor particularly interesting, but it’s kind of fun to watch Jeremy Piven strut around being a furious asshole to everyone and everything.

And that’s it. It’s inoffensive and juvenile and just not worth caring about one way or the other despite the thousands of words of hate-watch rampage reviews going up all over the Internet right now. I wanted to write one of those, but mediocrity in and of itself isn’t gasoline for the fire.

Steven Lloyd Wilson is a hopeless romantic and the last scion of Norse warriors and the forbidden elder gods. His novel, ramblings, and assorted fictions coalesce at www.burningviolin.com. You can email him here.