I’m gonna forego all ceremony and just tell you the best part of the Entourage movie, which is Ronda Rousey’s reading of the line, “I think somebody’s fuckin’ in there.” I will be purchasing this film on Blu-Ray six months hence in hopes of viewing outtakes from this scene. I need variations. “I think somebody’s fuckin’ in there.” “I think somebody’s fuckin’ in there.” If there are greater lines in the history of American cinema, they are all in Spaceballs. Ronda’s observation should be permanently looped and projected onto the Louvre, and indeed onto all buildings with high, broad exterior walls suitable for film projection. Amazing. Four stars for the Entourage movie.
The Entourage movie is reliably terrible: a crass, frictionless piece of cameo-overstuffed jet trash that will satisfy both fans of the HBO series and, more importantly, sworn enemies of the HBO series. I was cautiously the former until I became emphatically the latter after the episode (Season Four, Ep. Three, Title: “Malibooty”) where Turtle and Drama drive to some lady’s house to get rimjobs, and in so doing are compelled to say the word rimjob at least half a dozen times apiece. At which point I reevaluated and vastly improved my life, until it all went to hell eight years later when I paid real money to see this movie and therefore watch Drama say stuff like, “Fun is when you forget a girl’s name while you’re fuckin’.” I missed some serious naked boobage while writing that one down for you, by the way: Some comely lass was straddling the guy everyone calls E, but it’s cool, as there were myriad other instances of naked boobage, including the time shortly thereafter where a differently comely lass is straddling E before being rudely interrupted by Ronda Rousey, who high-kicks the bedroom door down after delivering the line, “I think somebody’s fuckin’ in there.”
So yeah, I dumped the show after the whole rimjob thing, though I did skulk through the mawkishly triumphant 2011 series finale, which this film gleefully disavows. Meaning that famous actor and vacuous charmer Vincent Chase is no longer married to some British journalist, and Ari Gold is no longer retired and has resumed his position as both a volcanic studio head and, in the person of Jeremy Piven, the only human in this whole production even pretending to act. (He imbues the insult dwarf-cunt with all the gravitas his schooling in commedia dell’arte can muster.)
Meanwhile, the boys in Vinnie’s titular entourage (the whole crew’s back!) have reverted to their usual, unenlightened selves. The gentle, hapless E is once again on the outs with girlfriend Sloan (who’s pregnant, which allows for a scene in which T.I. saunters through an obstetrician’s waiting room and suggests that his lady friend “shut her ovaries up”). Drama is a preening z-grade actor out of whose mouth pops the most uncouth things writer/director/overlord Doug Ellin could think of: Hand to God, the first line of this movie is, “I may have to jerk it before I even get there,” which maybe should’ve been the tagline. And Turtle is a newly svelte and weirdly mega-rich tequila magnate who gamely suffers a torn labrum in romantic pursuit of the aforementioned somebody’s-fuckin’-thinkin’ Ronda Rousey, who is the de facto female lead here, a dubious honor given that longtime female-lead-contender Perrey Reeves, playing Ari’s long-suffering wife, was billed only as “Mrs. Ari” until the third-to-last episode of the series and is back to just “Mrs. Ari” again here. Some degree of anonymity is maybe preferred, though.
The plot here is Will Vinnie’s Newest Movie Work, and that has been the plot of Entourage from time immemorial, and the hell with it. Billy Bob Thornton and Haley Joel Osment play nefarious Texan investors who wear vaguely Western outfits and all but remote-deposit their paychecks onscreen; likewise Emily Ratajkowski, who serves as Vinnie’s latest conquest and generally keeps everyone’s bow ties and beanie propellers a-spinnin’. The rest is garish opulence, joyless T&A, stilted broratory, guileless product placement (mostly for cars even the actors themselves can’t afford), and ... and ... shameless fun? Really? Not quite, but I did enjoy clowning on this movie in real time more than I enjoyed enjoying many other movies I greatly prefer. For a monument to casual misogyny and conspicuous consumption, the whole thing feels almost sweet and definitely cheap: Other than an opening yacht situation in Ibiza and Ari’s 10-second visit to Texas (Johnny Cash on the soundtrack; I’m sure he’d be thrilled), the whole rest of the movie finds our boys wanly prancing around L.A., arbitrarily getting into and out of cars like the “Too Rich to Care” family from the Sprint ads. Overall I’d believe you if you told me the “Hypnotize” video was more expensive. It certainly had more narrative drive.
But maybe you’re just in it for the celebrity cameos, of which there are, like, 70, half of which are so brusque they’ll likely blow right by you, and 90 percent of which somehow involve the word fuck. Jessica Alba alone distills a Scorsese movie into 45 seconds; even Warren Buffett considers going the Betty White route. The nonstop parade (Liam Neeson! Tom Brady! Jon Favreau! Pharrell! Gronk! Bob Saget! Greg Louganis! Toby from The West Wing!) is impressive in breadth and notably lacking in depth: “You guys enjoy your salads,” Armie Hammer glowers, before stalking offscreen and never appearing in another movie ever again. (It’s the second-best line in this thing.) A dumb sex-tape gag and a semi-climactic private-helicopter ride and a baby and a [redacted] speech and a mid-credits wedding and the show’s over. The whole thing’s vacuous and leering but somehow too cheesy to be actively malicious, like the Jackie Treehorn sequence from The Big Lebowski writ not-quite-large-enough, down to its propensity for treating objects like women, man.
If you think you’ll like this movie, you probably will; if you think you’ll despise it, you definitely will. Those in the latter camp will likely have more fun, really: Entourage endures as a witless whetstone on which to grind the axe of your superior taste, a bizarre and not-ineffective combination of winsome and loathsome. Regardless, your shelter in this storm is, you guessed it, Ronda Rousey, who is nobody’s idea of a thespian, but has a labored, cheerfully phony acting style that makes her perfect for a half-assed and bare-chested enterprise such as this, wanting nothing more than to half-convince you that she thinks someone’s fuckin’ in there, before kicking the door down to confirm her suspicions, just as the rest of the film confirms yours.
Rob Harvilla is Deadspin’s culture editor. Yes, there is one. He’s on Twitter.
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