There is very little worth to Entourage – the hit HBO series turned film. In it, Doug Ellin, creator and showrunner, turns a television show whose narrative lifeblood was the male fantasy embodied into an improbably thin movie whose narrative lifeblood is the male fantasy embodied. Impossibly attractive denuded models. Prompt coital embraces sans “the strings”. Hits of designer drugs with no comedowns. Tequila shots that don’t leave you with blinding hangovers and bloody stool. You can basically hear producer Mark Wahlberg spitting in your face, “What, like this isn’t what you dream about bro?!”

Take E (Kevin Connolly) for instance; a shrimpy, plain-faced bloodbag with a thatch of gingery hair and short stature. In Entourage, an embarrassingly predictable subplot concerned with his bagging two vixens in the same 24-hour cycle comes into play. Both are boner-punishingly attractive super models that for reasons completely ignored decide to slip into the sheets with our tedious day-waker.

Mind you, neither are the mother of his soon-to-be child. That honor goes to Sloan (Emmanuelle Chriqui), a character who show watchers will remember for being vaguely ethnic and otherwise just about as bland and salt-licked as E. For those encountering her for the first time, Sloan is a half-baked, prissy windbag that just so happens to be the film’s Atlas for any semblance of emotional core. A late stage scene has Johnny “Drama” Chase basically dropping everything to rush to her labor bedside but I’m pretty sure they never shared the screen beforehand. Uh, what?

And this is the dominant issue of the film. If you’ve not seen the show, you’re left shockingly in the cold. This is a “for the fans, by the fans” effort. One that deliberates chooses to sideline franchise newcomers in order to hedge in screen time for lackluster tertiary characters and disappointing cameos. Except perhaps Kelsey Grammer‘s. His was the only one worthwhile in a film that wasted five whole seconds with Liam Neeson. Oh the untapped potential!

Because Entourage the film exists somewhere between the point of an extended episode and an abbreviated season, it never goes anywhere meaningful nor is it able to move the titular entourage into uncharted waters. Sure Vince (Adrian Grenier) throws a ripping yahct party in Ibiza but it’s simply an opportunity to stuff in more freelance boobies and bong rips. But we’ve seen that from Entourage before. Correction: we’ve seen eight seasons worth of exactly that.

Attempts to check in with a slew of primary and secondary characters leave most with truncated arcs that are cursory in the best of circumstances and rushed, nonsensical and flat-out dumb in the worst. It’s fan service at its most hair-triggered and surface level. Not one character unearths a lick more depth. Almost all arrive back where we left them when the series pulled the plug (after an verifiably shaky final season). Rather, Ellin and Co. have thrown their characters back on the drawing board in ways that are shallower and more one-dimensional than they ever were on a tv show criticized for being shallow and one-dimensional.

Entourage thrived when its characters were forced to content with situations outside of their comfort zone – when Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) and Drama must turn lemons into an Eiffel Tower; and not when Vince dated porn stars – and Entourage the film has none of that. Even the infamous Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) has lost his bite in a sea of thinly veiled homophobia and oddly targeted ragebursts. Narratively, he’s had a fury inhibitor installed, leaving his vein-popping diatribes at an 8 when they used to go to 11. To see such a tv legend practically castrated is one of Entourage’s greatest sins.

Its biggest though is the fact that it’s just plain and simply a bad movie. An unnecessary, sophomoric foil in the form of a Haley Joel Osment/Billy Bob Thornton father-son business duo is deeply flawed though proves to be the least of the film’s problems. That honor goes to the fact that it fails to gel into, you know, an actual film. A movie is often defined by a three act structure, of which Entourage has only a semblance of, but most importantly it must make sense internally. Entourage just doesn’t. It’s an afterthought of an afterthought that requires deep research beforehand. It’s like Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. We’ve had enough already Pete. Put the camera down.

The end result has its mildly bemusing moments – especially when in the supremely self-deprecating hands of Kevin Dillon – but is ultimately an entirely unnecessary addition to canon whose conclusion we stopped caring about long ago. This afterthought of an afterthought is hardly worth an appendix, much less a wide-release. At least Ellin has seemed to realize that Grenier may depict a movie star but is in no way shape or form an actual movie star.