I did a bad thing last night.
I rented and watched Enough with Jennifer Lopez.
Oh, gag me with a spoon.
To be fair, I knew this was going to be a wretched movie, but I’d heard she learned a bunch of Krav Maga for it, and I’ve had a higher-than-usual interest in fighting movies since I’ve started learning to fight. I enjoy watching training sequences now and going, “I’ve done that! I know how to do that!”
And I’ve also begun to understand why my buddy Patrick – who’s a fifth-degree black belt in Kenpo karate – gets so frustrated with fight scenes.
“Enough” is one of those domestic-abuse movies that’s obviously been written and directed by a man.
“What, you mean, he’ll just hit her, and she’ll be a stay-home mom, and he makes all the money? That’s not scary enough! How about he has serial affairs, too? No, no, MORE, EVIL! How about he hires thugs to pose as FBI agents and go after her? How about he taps her phones? No, more! How about we find out that he conspired with a friend to get her into bed in the first time! Yay!”
Oh, puleez.
Want to know the scariest moment in the movie? It’s not when the pseudo-FBI agents come after her, or when some other guy is tracking her, or whatever else totally over-the-top crap happened that was thrown in there to make the guy REALLY SCARY. It’s the moment when, after he’s hit her, he goes into her purse and takes her keys and her wallet.
Really, that’s scary enough. So is canceling all of her credit cards and closing her accounts. That’s what it’s all about, keeping control over women. That’s why women owning their own property was such a big deal of a law to change, and why so many men balked at it for thousands of years. That’s why women still aren’t allowed to drive in some countries. Take away the money and the transport, and you control people.
So, unfortunately, instead of being a woman-training-to-kick-ass-and-finding-the-strength-in-herself-movie, this movie was just a really poor knockoff of Sleeping With the Enemy (which was way better, in my opinion), only really disjointed, over-the-top and bordering on the frickin’ ridiculous. I started fast-forwading through the husband-stalking-the-wife scenes, and about 2/3rds of the way through the movie, I realized I wasn’t going to get much Krav Maga, and the point of the movie wasn’t about the awesome realization of her power as a human being or anything. It was just about killing her husband.
“Oh, crap,” I said to my roomie, “it’s going to be one of those two-and-a-half-minute training sequences, isn’t it? The one’s with the music, where she learns how to move like a super ninja in three days?”
And, lo and behold:
All the Krav Maga we got was one of those two-and-a-half-minute training sequences with a nameless trainer, complete with the music.
And, BAM: Jennifer Lopez is a super ninja.
No, no really: she goes into the husband’s house and climbs around in the rafters and sets up this fighting trap for him, and moves all the guns around and closes her eyes and figures out the number of steps to all the furniture, and brings a bag of gear so that she can scamble cell phone signals in the house. It’s like the Karate Kid, only without all the actual, you know, training and self-discovery and shit like that. And, obviously, without any attempt whatsoever at realism.
That’s right, two-and-a-half-minutes of Krav Maga, and a former waitress has becomes James Bond.
Me, screaming in the background, “What the fuck is this???”
So Jennifer Lopez the Super Krav Maga Ninja kills her husband with her Krav Maga super powers, and the police arrive, and tell her she’s lucky to be alive, and then super ninja and her daughter go back to Seattle to shack up with the nice dorky guy she broke up with in high school and should have married in the first place.
The End.
What a lame movie.
