The Entitled (2011)

A brilliant film with a brilliant cast. With a twist around every corner, the film just kept getting more interesting by the minute!

This is a first rate kidnap thriller. Made more intriguing by the fact that the movie seems to advocate that rightness is on the side of the kidnapper.An apparently caring young male with problems including a very sick mother et al decides to kidnap three spoilt brat "entitled" privileged college kids. They are the offspring of three fairly repulsive rich and undeserving businessmen....The kidnapper has accomplices who also have an agenda.This film races along with pace and excitement and in my opinion the acting and production is top notch.Of course there may be some holes in the plot but who cares as this picture is highly entertaining and almost believable; it had me engrossed throughout.8/10.

Movies with bigger budgets have bored me with inane story lines and characters I don't care about. And I don't write a review for every movie that I'd watched, but I am certainly moved to do so for this one: it deserves a high rating, especially for the fact that the cast was not from the A-list crowd (except for Ray Liotta). Simply put, it's a solidly suspenseful movie, and I like the idea that it's about psychopathic behavior in its different guises. There is a bit of social commentary as well, as one can't help thinking about what is good/right/legal and bad/wrong/illegal. I was rooting for the protagonist and hoping he would get away with it, and then stopped to ask myself, "Is what he's doing good? Isn't he supposed to be the bad guy?" Any movie these days that make me think just that little bit deserves some kudos.

The Entitled began well, with excellent cinematography helped by some aerial shots for the opening.The characters are all, unfortunately, written very shallowly, with almost no information provided beyond what is seen on screen.The plot concerns a young man, Paul, who is seen at the beginning struggling to get a job (even though he is perfectly qualified) and providing for his ill mother.Very quickly, the movie introduces Paul's plot to kidnap the silver-spoon-fed children of a trio of rich men. He himself looks like the rich men's children (college age, attractive, great hair), but apparently without the money.His accomplices are another college-age guy and girl. One seems to be his girlfriend (who doesn't seem to be his type) and the other is a Columbine-killer type.The movie begins to fail very quickly once the three young people are kidnapped. The main kidnapper is portrayed as very detail-oriented and together, very purposeful, but he makes mistake after mistake that drive the rest of the story, making it very contrived.SPOILERS FOLLOW The main kidnapper, Paul, is describes as very detail-oriented and his plot is intricate and involves a bit of preparation, but once the plot begins, he sits around letting things happen which threaten his success unnecessarily.His two cohorts are unstable, which he purposely knows, but he makes almost no effort to stop them from doing things to screw things up. Some of this unstable behavior turns out to have been acceptable, but there are some things that they do that he couldn't have foreseen but are played off as being foreseen by him.For example, he tells his Goth cohorts that there is an explosive device at the location where the fathers of his kidnap victims are waiting for the return of their kids. His goth girlfriend sneaks down to where the 3 kids are being held and tells them of this. Later it turns out that there is no such explosive device. 2 of the kidnapped kids escape (because -- duh -- no one was watching them) and make a bee-line for where the parents are waiting to warn them of the impending detonation. This beeline keeps them off the road so that they don't see the main kidnapper driving on the road. SO -- we are expected to buy that Paul planned on lying to his cohorts about the device knowing that they will spill its existence to the kidnappees, knowing that they will escape with enough time to hope to get to their parents' location, knowing that they will have to go through through the forest because they don't have time to follow the road and get their in time, knowing that it will keep them from seeing him escape... but none of it mattering because there really was no explosive device and if they had just been kept locked up there would have been no need for the subterfuge.Paul makes a point of giving his male cohort a 9mm with blanks, knowing that he would be trigger-happy. All of this is played off as having been part of his plan, that the intended to blame all of what happened on the two cohorts. But it is beyond intelligent belief to accept that he would have planned everything will so many details relying on the out-of-control behavior of the other two.The kidnapping is effected by the girl standing in the middle of the road. Coming up on a girl standing threateningly in the middle of the road, the driver is, of course, inclined to stop his car and walk up to her, allowing the Columbine-type guy to "surprise" him with the shotgun (wait, wasn't he NOT supposed to have been given a gun with real ammo?) The 3 kids are taken to the mountain home of one of the other rich parents, which is just 2 miles from where the rich parents are staying in the other mountain home. They are put in a storage space beneath the house. They are tied up and basically NOT WATCHED. Occasional visits are made to them to provide proof of life and to intimidate them.The kidnappers spend their time staring at an unchanging computer screen and playing violent First-Person Shooter video games. NO ONE is tasked with watching to make sure their kidnap victims do not escape.Paul knows that his two accomplices are mentally unhinged, and makes a point of loading blanks into the pistol he gives the guy, but the guy at other times has the shotgun that IS properly loaded, and Paul hands the shotgun to the girl who promptly kills one of the hostages with it. For such a prepared plan, it reeks of poor planning, yet such a glaring plot hole drives the story forward.He has given a pistol loaded with blanks to the other cohort. Later, when he tries to shoot one of the hostages with the gun, the man falls back as if hit but then gets up and runs away. He could have killed someone with it not realizing it was loaded with blanks by pressing it against their body or head. It simply should have been loaded with dummy rounds, which don't have any explosive force.There are other numerous dangling plot points and unanswered questions.END OF SPOILERS For a film that looks as good as it does on screen, and with good performances from the actors (although the kidnap victims are severely underutilized, especially Laura Vandervoort) it is decidedly disappointing that the story fails completely. With a running time of 1 hour, 25 minutes (without the end credits), there was ample time to flesh out the characters and fix the numerous plot holes. It seems to come down to lazy story-telling in the end.The end result is a bad film, not worth watching.