Sleeping with the Enemy

Though Julia Roberts delivers as charismatic a performance as one might’ve expected, Sleeping with the Enemy is ultimately undone by a relentless emphasis on obvious and downright laughable elements that’ll surely leave even the most ingenuous viewer sporadically rolling their eyes. Roberts stars as Laura Burney, a battered wife who finally decides to leave her almost ridiculously abusive husband (Patrick Bergin’s Martin) by faking her own death. Laura quickly (and quietly) relocates to small-town Iowa, where she changes her name and begins seeing a sensitive drama teacher (Kevin Anderson’s Ben) – though, of course, it’s not long before Martin grows wise to his former wife’s activities. There’s little doubt that Sleeping with the Enemy‘s most egregious failing is in the development of Bergin’s Martin Burney, as the lack of subtlety with which screenwriter Ronald Bass, working from Nancy Price’s novel, has infused the figure proves to be far too insurmountable an obstacle for the film to overcome (ie he is, to paraphrase Mike Myers’ So I Married an Axe Murderer character, so evil that you would say he is eeeevil). Joseph Ruben’s far-from-subtle directorial choices (eg a trying-on-hats montage set to Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl”) only heighten the movie’s various problems, although it’s admittedly impossible to deny the effectiveness of the movie’s suspenseful (albeit entirely predictable) climax. In the end, Sleeping with the Enemy‘s exceedingly easy-to-follow storyline and cut-and-dried characters ensure that the film remains mindlessly entertaining throughout its brisk running time – yet it goes without saying that the rampantly silly atmosphere becomes awfully tough to take and the movie is finally unlikely to appeal to those above a certain age.

** out of ****