The crew out at Anchor Bay sent out a little something new, folks–so new you won’t even find it in stores until tomorrow–and it’s called The Entitled, an exciting little piece that promises interesting things. Can the product live up to the promise? The answer is surprisingly emphatic.

The Entitled follows a bicycle courier who’s seen better days, and can’t seem to land a new job to help himself get ahead. So he hatches a plan: to kidnap the young adult children of three wealthy and powerful men, and then hold them hostage until a ransom of one million dollars per child is paid up. But as it turns out, the idea of rich people forking over seven figure sums to get their kids back isn’t as easy as the bicycle courier thought, as the fathers have a few secrets of their own. And when the night turns violent–and bloody--the kids may get out alive, but how will the courier fare?

If you were wondering why more movies dong focus on the recession, it’s because of this. It turns out that such titles are spectacularly depressing, and there’s often precious little in the way of encouraging resolution. You want to hate the rich kids who spend all their time partying while the poor bastard bicycle messenger is selling his graduation watch to buy his mom’s medicine, but then you wonder why. Yeah, they’re rich and didn’t do anything more to earn it than get born into the right family, but still–is that a reason to kidnap, threaten, and almost kill them? This in turn has you looking back at the kidnapper, but considering he’s doing the kidnapping for money for his desperately poor family, you really can’t fault him either. So what direction do you put your support? Behind the clearly wronged rich kids who just got kidnapped because their dads had money? Or the poor kid who did the kidnapping because his mom can’t buy medicine? There’s no clear winner or loser here, at least not in the beginning. It actually gets worse the farther in you go, and the waters get significantly muddier with every passing minute. In fact, by the end, the whole affair is going to be an incredible mess jammed through the gills with twists. The last fifteen minutes will be absolutely laden with them. If you like a good crime drama with a few thriller elements, then you’ll be abundantly happy with this one.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, gives The Entitled a full ten out of ten, and wholeheartedly recommends it. This is some fantastically screwed-up crime drama that may start out a bit sludgy in the motivation department, but at the end will leave you breathless and cheering due to the sheer intricacy of the plot.