After suffering through this soul-scraping orgy of crass “bros-before-hos” cliches early last week, I commented on social media that “when a cameo appearance by Piers Morgan isn’t the very worst thing about your movie, you’re in trouble”. Ever the combatant, Morgan shot back that his was “a part, not a cameo”, adding hilariously that Kermode “rhymes with ‘commode’”.
Believe me, that Wildean witticism is more entertaining than anything in Entourage, a hatefully unfunny spin-off from the HBO TV series about Hollywood star Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) and the coterie of hangers-on from Queens who now form his Strip-cruising inner circle.
Things have moved on since the TV show and Vince has talked agent-turned-studio-head Ari (Jeremy Piven) into letting him direct a movie called Hyde, excerpts of which resemble outtakes from the kind of naff straight-to-video stinkers in which Adam Ant starred in the early 1990s. Hyde is clearly unreleasable and Entourage must surely deal with Vince’s high-profile failure and the consequent unravelling of his hellish clan?
But no. In this post-humour universe, these dickheads are heroes, universally loved, lavishly indulged. While films such as The Player satirised the vacuity of Hollywood, Entourage merely revels in it, napalming the screen with waves of pornographic consumerist vulgarity – cars, asses, cars, tits, boats, asses, cars – dredged directly from Tinseltown’s festering scrotum. In one key sequence, Kevin Dillon’s character, Johnny (who needs a short, sharp shock but instead gets a triumphant character arc), is seen enthusiastically jerking off over a computer screen. For a moment I thought we had cut to some behind-scenes-footage of the film-makers working on the script. Or the edit. Or, indeed, the shoot.
Compared to this, Sex and the City 2 looks like an art film in which earnest radicals read from the works of Karl Marx and Andrea Dworkin. On the plus side, Piven just about escapes with his reputation intact. On the downside, a swath of self-congratulatory celebs flash their smug mugs in a world so grotesquely chauvinistic you want Imperator Furiosa to arrive in a War Machine and nuke the place. Believe me, The Human Centipede was more sensitively attuned to issues of gender politics. And it had better jokes. Even producer/inspiration Marky Mark looks embarrassed by his cameo. Sorry, his “part”.
