J-Lo's latest tepid role will have audiences saying 'Enough'

DIRECTOR: Michael Apted

CAST: Jennifer Lopez, Bill Campbell,

Noah Wyle, Juliette Lewis

RUNNING TIME: 115 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for violence, mild sensuality

WHERE: Alderwood 7, Crossroads, Everett 9, Factoria, Galleria, Issaquah 9, Kent 6, Longston, Metro, Mountlake 9, Pacific Place, Parkway Plaza, Redmond Town Center, Renton Village, SeaTac North, South Hill Mall, Valley Drive-in, Woodinville 12.

GRADE: D

After a string of tepid movies -- "The Wedding Planner" and "Angel Eyes" among them -- she's not bound to win any fans in this implausible and ugly movie about an abused wife who fights back.

For one thing, it's already been done by Julia Roberts in "Sleeping With the Enemy" and Ashley Judd in "Double Jeopardy." And even though Lopez knows how to wring sympathy out of an audience, the script of "Enough" is more than enough of a mess to tarnish her box-office luster.

Here she plays Slim, a struggling waitress in a dingy tourist diner. When a slimy customer (Noah Wyle) hits on her and then insults her after she rejects him, she's rescued by soft-spoken, handsome Mitch (Bill Campbell). In quick procession, we're shown their wedding and banged over the head with the fact that Mitch is rich and entitled.

After their daughter is born, Slim's perfect life sours. She discovers Mitch has a mistress ("I'm a man after all," he tells her lamely) and he has a penchant for beating her up when she argues with him. Frightened, Slim goes on the lam with her daughter only to find that Mitch has set a roadblock at every turn and in every city where she tries to reinvent her life.

So what's a gal to do but take up martial arts and fight back? After all, she's told, "self defense isn't murder."

"Enough" is so poorly constructed and so elementally banal that it's a shock the script was written by the same guy (Nicholas Kazan) who wrote such taut thrillers as "At Close Range" and "Reversal of Fortune."

It's cheap, exploitive and resorts to using a little girl as its catalyst to condone violent actions and to prodding the audience into booing a husband, who is such a one-dimensional, cardboard baddie it's a wonder a woman with Slim's savvy and street smarts wouldn't have picked up on his smarm and dishonesty a long time before he plopped a wedding ring on her finger.

It's the kind of movie that probably will do well despite savage reviews if only because there's a visceral joy in watching a woman battling against such seemingly insurmountable odds. But also there are so many bloopers, it's hard not to giggle. Mitch sets an alarm in his house and then Slim walks around without setting the thing off. It's just plain nonsense.

Not even great shots of the Seattle skyline, ferries at Port Townsend and Gig Harbor (which stand in as a northern Michigan town) can make up for cheap, cliched chills and a convenient, silly story line that has us crying "Enough!" long before the closing credits roll.