Well, the Entourage boys are back in town. As a big fan of the show, especially the first half of its run, I was excited at the prospect for more, but hesitant based on the second half. After several years, the HBO Original Series, Entourage, has made its way to the big screen, despite it having a rather lackluster last couple of seasons, which should have been indicative that the show had run out of material. But, someone thought it would be a good idea, so now what we have is basically a prolonged episode of the TV show that manages to go through all the motions that an entire season would fulfill in a 100 minute package. This would be alright if it was the first few seasons of the show they were emulating, but these feel like the last set, making us wonder why they would want to make it at all.

Just like every season of the show, the movie finds Vince (Adrien Grenier) and his pals E(Kevin Connolly), Turtle (Jerry Ferrara), and Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon) in some situation that would eventually get resolved without much trouble. The movie, which takes place shortly after the events of the final season, has Vince directing his first film which has gone significantly over budget. To find money, Ari (Jeremy Piven) finds a rich father (Billy Bob Thornton) and son (Haley Joel Osment) to back the movie, but as always, things go wrong.

With a 12 episode season, and 30 minute episodes, there is about six hours to fully flesh out a story, allowing each of the characters an arch, all while not having it feel rushed. The movie tries to do all of this in 100 minutes. By the end of the film, not everything is fully resolved. Threads are started and never tied off, characters get involved with completely nonsensical subplots that go nowhere, and the movie feels like it is struggling to even find a plot in its mess of a story. Basically the whole movie, like the show, gives the actors an excuse to hit on attractive women, go to beautiful destinations, and to hang out with a huge number of cameos that are extremely unnecessary.

Bringing back all of the actors and seeing them together once again is fun at first. We never got a full sense of closure for where their lives ended up after the series supposedly ended, so to see what was going on was nice, but then the actual movie started and it felt like a regurgitation of the previous seasons. We don’t even get a sense of closure at the end of the movie—certainly indicative of more on the way—and we feel cheated by the sense that this was supposed to be some sort of epilogue to the entire series that ended up being a quasi-reboot.

Let this be the last we see of the boys and their escapades. Not because they’re bad, or not entertaining. It’s just that there aren’t really any worthwhile stories left to tell. Entourage tried to bring the boys to the big screen, and it did, but it is a series that does not translate well to time-constraints. Go check out the first couple seasons instead.