Enough (2002)

(In theaters, May 2002) Pure exploitative trash! Take a beautiful female protagonist, give her the worst psycho husband ever imagined and then give her a rationale for killing him. It doesn’t take much more to make such an obviously manipulative film. The surprise here isn’t how unsubtle is the film as much as it’s how it all works so well: The husband is enough of a crazy maniac that killing him doesn’t seem an act of female aggression as much as a righteous purge for all humankind. (You just have to see how he behaves with other men to figure out how much of an eeevil antagonist he is.) Jennifer Lopez is wonderful (as usual) as the protagonist, going from innocent to victim to fighter in one satisfying arc. (I don’t like her short hair nearly as much as her usual hairstyle, but that’s pretty shallow, isn’t it?) Let’s not fool ourselves: Enough is pure thriller trash without social signification, but executed well enough that is becomes somewhat of a guilty pleasure. Your mileage may vary.