The Entitled (2010) on DVD & Blu-ray, September 6, 2011
The first fifteen minutes or so of The Entitled convinced me it was a film I didn’t want to see. There’s a bunch of rich college kids (Dustin Milligan, Laura Vandervoort, and John Bregar) partying and snorting coke and a bunch of punky, gothy college kids (Kevin Zegers, Tatiana Maslany, and Devon Bostick [Sacrifice]) putting together a get-rich quick scheme. If things aren’t irritating enough, one of the punky (Zegers) kids has a few problems: his mother has a horrible illness (cough cough), her medication costs over a thousand dollars a pop, and their house is being foreclosed. That tired old plot of the hero having to be heroic to save mom and the farm went out with silent pictures, I thought.
Fortunately, the punk kids are planning to kidnap the rich kids which totally makes the film worth watching. Actually…it’s what happens during the kidnapping, as some things go to hell, that makes the film worth watching (and cast members Ray Liotta, Stephen McHattie, and Devon Bostick who are all worth keeping an eye on). It seems that the rich fathers (Liotta, McHattie, and Victor Garber as “Bob”) are getting together to play poker (somewhere up in the mountains) and their kids are going to join them there. The plan is to kidnap the kids, hold them for a million dollars ransom each, and then pay off the house, buy the medication that insurance doesn’t cover, and live happily ever after—or something like that.
One of the most interesting things about The Entitled is that it’s more intelligent than it seems, and the only way to discover the intelligence is to let the story unfold. Just as one is ready to say, “C’mon, you should know better than to choose two psychos to be your aid-and-abettors,” one realizes that there’s a method behind the madness. Does the audience care about the kidnapped kids and their dads? Not really—the dads are all involved in financial dealings (i.e., screwing people out of their pensions), the boys are arrogant jerks, and the girl is a bitch. Of course we sympathize with the punks.
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