Enough (2002)

Michael Apted spent a career documenting the British class system in seven-year increments, so it is a curious detour to find him presiding over a Jennifer Lopez revenge thriller adapted from an Anna Quindlen novel. Enough opens with Slim pouring coffee in a Los Angeles diner, meets a wealthy contractor who stages a chivalrous rescue, and then methodically dismantles the marriage. The abuse is rendered with grim, functional efficiency. Mitch freezes the bank accounts, invokes his status as breadwinner, and reminds his wife that he will not live without her. The film understands that financial leverage is a weapon, though it never indicts the system that supplies it. The villain is one man, not an economy.

The engine is unmistakably a battered wife reclaiming her body and her agency. Lopez has said as much, calling it an empowerment story and describing her Krav Maga training as a way to level the playing field between men and women. She called it her female Rocky. The final act, in which Slim breaks into her husband's house, disarms it, and knocks him off a balcony, is the promotional campaign in miniature. The film delivers this through thriller mechanics: a car chase, a corrupt cop, a woman hired to impersonate her. No statistics recited over a slow zoom. It wants bloodlust, not a policy paper.

Beyond that, the film is a product of its moment and little more. Lopez headlines as a working-class Latina and Bill Cobbs appears in support, but the surrounding cast is standard white Hollywood and the screenplay shows no interest in what any of it means. Race goes unmentioned. So does everything else on the contemporary checklist. What remains is a lean, occasionally ludicrous machine, dismissed by critics in 2002 as implausible and ugly, then quietly rehabilitated as one of its star's better vehicles. It is not a sermon. It is a woman learning to throw a punch, and the culture has not decided how to file that.