Enough Movie Review
Is it Jennifer Lopez or J-Lo? Either way, Enough is enough, or is it not enough? Lopez continues her struggling career, after the flop that was Angel Eyes and the overly ambitious The Cell in Enough, a movie about domestic abuse that just jumps off the cliff that is called reality and keeps on falling.
Lopez stars as a woman named Slim (yes, Slim) who meets the man of her dreams and gets married. They have a child, and then he starts to beat her. In one single day she learns that he is cheating on her and that he believes that since he has the money, he has the right to do whatever he wants. She nods, scared for her child's safety, and doesn't call the police.
The believability leaves after fifteen minutes. From all of the things I have heard about spousal abuse, Enough seems to have gotten it all wrong. Granted, what goes in the story is better to make a movie, but it sure doesn't seem very realistic. Maybe I'm wrong - there probably are a few cases like this - but for the most part I was not impressed by the way Billy Campbell's character took a 180 degree turn in the span of a few minutes. Things could have been done so much better.
Anyway, after realizing that going to the police will just cause her to risk her life more, she has her friends help her escape in the middle of the night. Yes, instead of running away during the day while her husband is at work, she decides to sneak out of the house while he is sleeping. That is guaranteed trouble.
The stupidity continues from there. After that incident, where he nearly beats her to a pulp and even knocks the kid around, she decides not to go to the ER where they could get documentation of the abuse - on both the wife and mother ยท and goes to a hotel instead. If I were one of her friends in the car, I would have taken her to the hospital or police station whether she liked it or not. So anyway, she doesn't, and this begins her "adventure" of running about the country while he pursues her, using his wealth to get access to information that most people wouldn't.
At one point she is found by one of Campbell's friends (Noah Wyle) and he nearly drives her off the road, which doesn't make sense because Campbell wants his daughter alive. Of course, as seen in the previews, you know that Lopez decides to train and eventually fight back, since self defense is not murder. I always thought that if you broke into someone's home wearing heavy rings on each finger to act as brass knuckles, and then beat your husband until he is dead, that that was murder. I guess not. Don't get me wrong - he deserved what was coming to him - but Enough is filled with these stupid coincidences and so forth that drive the story where the writer wanted it to go, whether it be realistic or not.
To make matters worse, and to throw any credibility out the window, director Michael Apted decided to separate the movie into chapters. What do I mean? The very first thing that is displayed after the Columbia Pictures studio label is a black screen that says "Hey" in big, white letters, a screen that I could easily have made in Powerpoint, or Word for that matter. A few minutes later, the black screen returns again, this time with the same cheesy lettering, only saying, "How they met." The point of these "Fraiser"-esque chapter separations is unclear, and they just look stupid; at least Apted decided to be inconsistent and didn't use them in the second half of the film.
Enough had potential; it really did. It is sort of a rip-off of Julia Roberts' Sleeping with the Enemy, only there the spousal abuse was portrayed accurately and realistically, and Roberts' character was pretty smart. Had this story been looked over by some experts in the field, and had the whole crew not collaborated to make everything as cheesy as possible, Enough could have been a pretty decent movie with some good insight on spousal abuse. Instead, all I have to say is that I had more than enough of this crappy film.
Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.