With Women Of Action, Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these stories say about gender and how depictions of female action heroes have evolved over time.
Theatergoers who sat down to watch Jennifer Lopez in 2002’s Enough must have been awfully confused. The film was marketed as a brutal action-revenge thriller but opens as a rom-com only to spend the bulk of its runtime as a harrowing drama about domestic abuse. It’s an odd little hodgepodge of a movie that begins with a sunny montage set to Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up the Sun” and ends with Lopez beating the shit out of someone using Krav Maga. And—like the best elevated B-movies—Enough toes the line between grounded and over-the-top in a way that makes it both utterly ridiculous and deeply satisfying.
I didn’t see Enough in theaters, but discovered it as one of those cable TV staples that used to play endlessly on TNT. Though the movie opened to poor reviews (it has a 22% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and made a middling $51.8 million at the box office, it’s grown into a bit of a cult hit over the years. I remember watching it on TV one high school summer while a bunch of my sister’s friends hung out in the backyard. One by one they’d each wander through the house and pause to say, “Oh, Enough, I love this movie!”
For those not yet initiated into the cult of Enough, it exists right at the center of the Venn diagram between Emerald Fennell’s spiky revenge flick Promising Young Woman, Julia Roberts’ ’90s domestic thriller Sleeping With The Enemy, and Blake Lively’s controversial romantic drama It Ends With Us. Lopez is Slim, a down-on-her-luck waitress who meets cute with wealthy contractor Mitch Hiller (Billy Campbell) when he steps in to save her from a sleazy customer. The two marry, have a daughter named Gracie (Tessa Allen), and settle into a pitch-perfect suburban life until Slim discovers that Mitch is cheating on her. She confronts him about it, and he slaps her. When she tells him he’s not allowed to hit her, he punches her in the face with such force that it knocks her to the ground.
Like a lot of Enough, it’s a sequence that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Lifetime movie. But what makes it genuinely unsettling is the detail that follows: Mitch tells Slim he’s going out to see his mistress, then calmly walks over to her purse and removes her car keys and ID. “Just so you don’t do anything later you might regret. Okay?” he tells her before kissing her on the forehead. Enough gets that when it comes to domestic abuse, physical violence is just one element of a much broader, wide-reaching pattern of control.
I don’t want to oversell the emotional realism of Enough, which is ultimately a fairly schlocky, if effectively tense, thriller. But director Michael Apted and writer Nicholas Kazan are clearly interested in bringing in at least some elements of realism to the proceedings. There are subtle red flags that hint at Mitch’s controlling nature before he finally erupts in violence (he bullies an older couple into selling their home and takes a possessive stance when Gracie is born). The script highlights the victim-blaming that so often comes with domestic violence when Mitch’s mom sympathetically hugs an injured Slim, but then asks “What did you do? What did you say to him?” And the movie lays out why going to the cops isn’t always an easy solution for abuse victims.
In one of Enough’s most pointed scenes, Slim visits a police station to talk through what would actually happen if she were to report Mitch: he’d be arrested but could easily get out on bail, it would be up to the city attorney whether he’s actually prosecuted, the only thing protecting her would be “a little piece of paper” of a protection order, and unless she can legally prove he’s a danger to Gracie, she wouldn’t be able to stop him from seeing their daughter. While It Ends With Us was dinged this summer for dealing solely with the emotional side of why women stay in abusive relationships, Enough is interested in the economic and legal realities that keep women trapped too. When Slim finally decides to take Gracie and flee, Mitch freezes her finances and threatens to frame her as a drug addict in order to get full custody.
The second act of Enough is mostly about Slim going on the run in an increasingly ridiculous set of wigs, while Mitch chases her down with the obsessive fervor and endless resources of a Bond villain. It’s where the movie really starts to lose touch with reality, although, charitably, I think you could argue that Apted is trying to depict what it feels like to be stalked by an abusive ex—even if most of them aren’t sending hired goons to pose as FBI agents. Regardless, most of the movie’s middle act is devoted to building the case that no matter what Slim does or how impressively resourceful she is, Mitch will never stop coming for her. If she truly wants to build a new life, she has to decide she’s had… enough.
Thus, Enough switches from a woman-on-the-run story to a full-on revenge thriller—a subgenre that’s fueled women-led action movies since the controversial rise of rape-revenge films in the 1970s. Slim hires a Krav Maga trainer to turn her into a fighting machine, assembles a collection of high-tech gadgets worthy of Mission: Impossible (the movie conveniently gives her a rich absentee father to fund her scheming), and concocts an elaborate plan to break into Mitch’s home and murder him in a way that makes it look like self-defense.
It’s a bravura setpiece that makes you appreciate the range of Lopez’s screen presence. Sandra Bullock was the first choice for the role, and while she would’ve nailed the scared housewife side, I don’t know if she could’ve committed to the revenge bit with the campy gusto that Lopez does. With Bullock, I suspect the final showdown would’ve been grittier and more realistic. Lopez’s innate diva confidence lets the final sequence have an edge of fun that makes the revenge satisfying, rather than merely harrowing. “Are you such a coward that you can only hit me when I’m not expecting it?” Slim taunts Mitch as she punches him with a fist full of gold rings.
Of course, hanging over the ending is the question of whether it’s in bad taste to have a story about the very real issue of domestic abuse become a cheesy action movie about a woman kicking butt. But I get what Lopez meant when she said she took the role because she found it empowering. In a literal sense, “become Ethan Hunt” is terrible advice for women looking to escape abusive relationships, and I don’t know if any audience members came away with Lopez’s intended message that, “The power to get out of [negative relationships] is always within yourself.” But in a metaphorical sense, watching Slim take matters into her own hands delivers a triumphant sense of catharsis that too few abuse victims get to experience in real life. It’s the same sort of balance that made Elisabeth Moss’ Invisible Man riff such a critical darling back in 2020.
Rewatching Enough, it struck me that while the prototypical male-driven revenge movie is one where the male lead is either avenging a dead female loved one (Memento, Gladiator) or rescuing one who’s in peril (Taken, Man On Fire), female revenge movies are far more likely to be about a woman avenging herself. While Slim has the added motivation of protecting her daughter, it’s crucial that Gracie isn’t actively in peril during the finale. Instead, Slim is preemptively taking matters into her own hands because, as her best friend Ginny (Juliette Lewis) puts it, “You have a divine, animal right to protect your own life and the life of your offspring.” (Another one of those “hell yeah!” moments that make the movie so rewatchable.)
In a way, both male- and female-driven revenge movies are rooted in the idea that women are inherently weaker and in need of protection. They just come to two different conclusions about who that protection should come from. For men, the fantasy is that they can save (or at least avenge) the women they love. For women, the fantasy is that they can break the mold and learn to save themselves. And—because the male gaze is seldom totally gone from the action genre—that they can look sexy while they do it.
In the end, Enough gives Slim a suspiciously easy happy ending that relies on the legal system taking her side in a way I’m not sure the rest of the movie has convinced us it will. But while there are certainly better-crafted female-revenge action thrillers out there, what makes Enough special is where it sits on the sliding scale of realism. It’s more grounded than Quentin Tarantino’s gloriously heightened martial arts extravaganza Kill Bill, while still being more escapist than something truly gritty like I Spit On Your Grave or The Nightingale. It’s full of righteous critiques of a broken system, but it’s not so upsetting that you can’t watch it as Sunday afternoon fun (complete with a cheesy Lopez song over the credits).
In other words, the fact that Enough is a little bit ridiculous is more of a feature than a bug. As film critic Mick LaSalle put it in one of the film’s rare positive reviews, “If Enough were merely realistic, it might be too much to take. [We need] relief at the prospect of getting tossed some red meat.” If there’s a lingering message here, it’s not that cinema can help women escape real-life dangers, but that women deserve schlocky action movies too.
Next time: How Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman broke the superhero glass ceiling
