Enough (2002)

IMDb plot summary: On the run from an abusive husband, a young mother begins to train herself to fight back.
Directed by Michael Apted. Starring Jennifer Lopez, Billy Campbell, Tessa Allen, and Juliette Lewis.

(Some spoilers ahead about the ending.)

This movie is OK. My main issue with it is that everything gets needlessly complicated very quickly, without a lot of build-up. We go from "girl meets boy" to "girl and boy gets married" to "SUDDENLY BOY IS A PSYCHOPATH" without really giving us any sense of what the relationship and the characters before the guy was just randomly trying to kill her. As such, it's hard to really care about Lopez's character, since we never got a chance to know her before everything happened.

I'm also really skeptical about her being able to learn how to perfectly defend herself in the time she had... AND about all the special moves she learned being the exact ones she needed during the actual fight. Don't get me wrong, it's satisfying when she pulls it off, but not quite enough to make up for the contrived fight scene.

It's a good premise for a movie. I like the idea behind it. It just feels haphazard, like they filmed the script's first draft when it clearly needed a couple more rewrites to make everything come together.

2 stars.

Flickchart: #1587 out of 2086, below What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and above Detour. That is a little lower than it should be. I didn't *dislike* the movie so much as I just wasn't impressed.