Paul Ryan (Kevin Zegers) is a smart, well-educated young man who was failed by the American dream. He can’t land a good job, he still lives with his parents. His mother is sick, and their insurance doesn’t cover her medication. Fed up with the rich being entitled to everything, he comes up with a great plan to make 3 million dollars. He recruits two university students – Dean (Devon Bostick) and Jenna (Tatiana Maslany) with suicidal/violent tendencies, and together they kidnap the rich and spoiled Hailey (Laure Vandervoort), Nick (Dustin Milligan) and Jeff (John Bregar).
Hailey, Nick and Jeff are three childhood best friends whose rich businessmen fathers have also been friends for ages. As they are on their way to meet their fathers at Nick’s father Richard’s (Ray Liotta) house, they are kidnapped by Jenna and Dean and taken to a remote lake house. While Dean doesn’t like it one bit, Paul is in charge and he has even dated Jenna to manipulate her.
Paul has thought of everything. He never calls Jenna or Dean, he never talks to the hostages or shows his face. He uses gloves, and he uses a voice jammer when he makes the ransom call. It is simple: Each father is to give 1 million dollars to save his kid. But when Jenna learns that Jeff’s father hasn’t met the other fathers yet, she loses it and kills Jeff.
From then on, it becomes the ultimate challenge for Richard and Clifford (Hailey’s dad – played by Stephen McHattie) to keep Jeff’s death and the kidnapping from his father, Bob (Victor Garber). There is constant tension as friendships and motives are put to test, and desperate times will call for desperate measures as Richard reveals to Clifford that he doesn’t have the money…
With Paul hardly able to control Jenna (or Dean, Hailey and Nick try to escape. Even though the initial plan is perfect, can Paul pull off getting the money without letting Nick and Hailey be harmed.? And there is always the danger of Bob endangering the plans once he finds out….
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What makes The Entitled special?
The Entitled does a great job of portraying grey characters. Well, apart from Dean and Jenna who are already too lost and too dangerous to be of any good to anyone…
But Paul is the perfect “villain”- he commits the crime for a perfectly good reason. You root for him from the beginning. Here you have a guy trying to save his mother, as opposed to 3 spoiled brats who drink and do drugs and don’t really care about the outside world. Of course Nick is a little more responsible, but he hangs with Hailey and Jeff all the time.
Paul is smart, calculating and is actually quite logical in who he decides to save and who he doesn’t mind hurting . You don’t have a career criminal or a psychopath. But he is cold-blooded when he needs to be. He has done his research, and he has planned his every move. And he seems to deal with the unexpected well…
The rich fathers are to be empathized with as they are loving parents to their kids. However we know they didn’t make their money by being honest and fair-so a part of us despises them just like Paul does. We don’t want the kidnapped kids to die, but we definitely want Paul to get away with it-with the money.
It might have some clichés, but it avoids a lot of clichés really well. The pace is slow sometimes, but it never fails to keep you wondering.
There is the issue of two minor plot holes, but we don’t know for sure if they are plot holes. Meaning: The ending we get may not be as definite as we think, and in that sense, they are not plot holes but just situations created to keep us wondering.
At 6.2 on IMDB, 2011’s The Entitled is under-rated. It might not be a game-changer in the drama/thriller genre, but it plays the game very well with some fresh angles. Not to mention a great cast.
Fun Notes about the Cast
- Laura Vandervoort played alien Lisa, the queen’s daughter in sci-fi series V (2009 version).
- Victor Garber plays fathers often, but his characters are really different from each other. For instance, in the J.J.Abrams-created TV series Alias (starring Jennifer Garner), he played Sydney Bristow’s father Jack Bristow a seasoned agent with secrets, and a darn good poker face.
- Stephen McHattie is no stranger to shady characters. Haven fans know him as Rev. Driscoll, who did everything in his power to make the “troubled” citizens’ life difficult.
- Kevin Zegers plays grey characters often. In The Narrows, he found himself working for the local mob so that he could get into photography classes. In It’s a Boy Girl Thing he was a popular jock who didn’t exactly treat his brainy neighbor well. In The Jane Austen Book Club, he seduced his high school French teacher.
