Too much. An empowerment potboiler lifted above a USA Network original only by the star power of Jennifer Lopez, it chronicles the heroine's time-lapse evolution from greasy-spoon waitress to satin-sheets bride to blank-check homemaker to cheated-on, battered, and verbally abused spouse. First major warning sign: her husband declines her request to join him in the shower, even after she has already got her robe halfway off. (The men in the audience will turn on him faster than the women.) Once the monster is unmasked, he's pure "Boo!" Billy Campbell, a television nice guy, going bad in tandem with another television nice guy, Noah Wyle, invests the part with a rub-it-in-your-face smugness and sadism: "You wanna fight? I'm a man, honey. It's no contest." You wanna bet? She's J.Lo, buddy. Give her a month of martial-arts instruction and a rematch. (Her getaway plan in the middle of the night is a dilly: wedging a trickling water bottle between the toilet seat and porcelain bowl while she sneaks down the stairs with her daughter, a ruse that can be counted on to buy her a half-minute head start.) Nothing about all this -- the narrative poverty, the moral cowardice, the two-faced finale, the common coinage of the foreboding background music, the pep-pill pop songs, the bowled-over trash cans and crashed-through chain-link fences of the mandatory car chase -- would be quite so depressing if it were not coming from a director (Michael Apted) who once did stuff like Coal Miner's Daughter and Gorky Park, and who even now carries on (doesn't he?) the documentary series of 28 Up, 35 Up, etc. With Juliette Lewis, Dan Futterman, Fred Ward. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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