ENOUGH (2002) Where's a killer anaconda when you need one? Oh crap, it's Enough. Not that I couldn't tell from light-years off that this movie was sub-horrible. I would never have gone near this one, and probably would've forgotten it had ever existed had it not been incidentally rented by someone else (yeah, thanks Susan) and made available on an evening when I had no other plans. Enough is like some weird revenge fantasy in the mind of someone who's heard (probably through suspicious channels) a few basic pseudo-feminist ideas, interpreted them into her twisted gender- and racial-coded mental framework, and has embraced them with some kind of sick desperation. This is the most shamelessly manipulative movie I've seen since Patch Adams, and at least Patch Adams didn't use wifebeating as its populist hook. Jennifer "J-Lo" Lopez plays Slim (these ass-jokes just tell themselves, don't they?), a small town waitress who falls for a thuddingly obvious con while on the job, where hunky, successful Mitch (Billy Campbell) comes to her "rescue". This con ends with her dating Mitch and ultimately marrying him. Mitch then threatens/bullies an easily-threatened/bullied man into selling his house to them (at this point, the movie is still trying to pass off this behavior as cute), and after some further wedded bliss, they squeeze out a kid, who spends the movie trying very hard to be as adorable as possible. Then things turn sour; he has an affair, is caught and forgiven, but keeps having them. So when she confronts him about it, he starts smacking her around and telling her that she'd better learn to live with it. Off comes the thin veneer of Good Mitch - his on-a-dime metamorphosis into Mitchestopheles is complete! He goes on to rattle off variants of "If I can't have you, no one can!" a few times. No help from the impotent/corrupt police or Mitch's mom, who asks her what she did to set him off. So, smart-like-tractor Slim decides she's had...Enough! And to skip town on her husband in the middle of the night, while he's home, sneaking out of bed, setting up dripping a bottle of water to cover for herself in the bathroom, packing up the kid who's trying to sleep...couldn't she just have done this in the daytime when he's not home? Well, I suppose the "owl call" signal from the guy waiting in the van outside would've been suspicious during the day. This is a really lousy plan. Slim is later surprised to find that her bank accounts have been frozen. Lucky for her, she knows how to forge entirely new identities simply by asking for the birth certificates of dead people. But Mitch manages to find Slim and the kid wherever they go, with the help of some hired goons (hired goons?) and a corrupt cop that was instrumental in that con earlier on. So they move on, have another close call, and move on again, cyclically, one of these times shacking up with an old boyfriend, who disappears from the movie entirely with the evil husband uttering some line about "fishing his guts out of Lake Michigan", or something, but the ending suggests he's still alive. Finally Slim has REALLY had Enough, and decides to get proactive. She ships the kid off and takes a month's worth of apparently very intense self-defence courses. Then she sets up an elaborate situation in Mitch's new home where she intends to beat him to death and make it look like self defence. She's convinced that no jury will convict her, even though she never paused to make any official record of his abuse and she actually intends to kill him in HIS house. Maybe she's right. Or, maybe the police will wonder how all those boxing-tape fibers got into his facial wounds and who cut the phone lines. Slim should've watched or read Dolores Claiborne before coming up with her plan. You might think I've made some spoilers here, but rest assured, I've told you nothing that wasn't shown in the ads. There's only about fifteen minutes to go in this movie when Slim starts taking those self-defence courses. Long before then, Slim goes to see her long-absent father-in-denial (Fred Ward) who blows her off but later supplies her with apparently limitless money (with which she buys a house and several cars) when his curiosity is piqued by a visit from the goon squad. It amuses me to note that this movie, with its pretentions of feminism, lets a man shift instantly from villain to hero because he shells out a few bucks. The entire movie's approach towards domestic abuse is facile and exploitative, not like you couldn't tell from the ads. Mitch's actions aren't those of an abusive husband, but those of an automaton in a screenplay that requires its villain to be as evil as possible without actually taking a city hostage, and as omniscient as possible within the limits of letting Slim usually stay a step or so ahead of him. He doesn't beat her because he's angry or drunk or has any apparent reason to want to hang on to her when he'd clearly rather be with someone else, he beats her because screenwriter Nicholas Kazan seems to think that's what villains do. But he doesn't beat the kid, because if he did, this movie might've had trouble getting away with its PG-13. Sure, Campbell makes for a hissable heel, and J-Lo delivers the barely-serviceable performance she's managed to coast on in every facet of her showbiz career, but does it matter? Would you be surprised in the least if you found that this movie has a riff on one of those "I can't kill an unarmed man...WAIT, HE'S GOT A GUN!!!" endings? It really doesn't get much worse than this. Enough is the worst Death Wish sequel that was never made, stacking up pretty well against the ones that were. I wouldn't be too surprised if this eventually gets considered a cult favorite among the handful of bad-movie aficionados who can howl at a movie like this guilt-free. BACK TO THE E's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE