Parents' Guide to Enough

The inspiring theme of Enough is female empowerment, but that doesn't make it believable. Drenched in a horror movie score, with music leading us to fear what's behind a perfectly innocent shower curtain, most of this is low-level, manipulative exploitation. Tension is contrived in unnecessary scenarios -- in one high-speed chase, a driver tries to push another car off the road. Isn't there enough intrinsic tension in the story of an uncontrollably violent man trying to kill his escaped wife? The theme of female rights gets lost in the effort to make this appealing beyond the subset of aggrieved women to everyone who loves action movies. This is one of many bad decisions that derails the movie's solid starting point -- an exploration of domestic abuse. On the subject of bad judgment, one wonders what committee dreamt up randomly displaying titles every now and then, including "our happy family," "more than enough," "get out," and "new leaf"?

When Slim decides to fight back, 80 minutes into the action, there's a shift from the worrying story of a woman on the run from her unhinged husband to quasi-Olympic training mode. In an utterly implausible plan that depends on oh-so-many variables lining up perfectly, Slim trains to beat up and possibly kill her tall, fit, unrelenting spouse. The big plus here is that at least in this mode the repetitive theme of Slim running from the fearsome Mitch every time she finds a new home comes to an end.