Cheap Sleeping with the Enemy (DVD) (Julia Roberts, Patrick Bergin) (Joseph Ruben) Price

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Customer Reviews of Sleeping with the Enemy

Without Julia Roberts this wouldn't even register
'Sleeping With The Enemy' was the movie meant to change Julia Roberts from cute into serious actress. Little did she know it but that wasn't to come for another ten years with 'Erin Brockavich' (where both she and the film are excellent). But the problem with this movie isn't the acting, far from it both Roberts and Bergin are both fine, but the way it takes a familiar subject and treats it in such a boring and disrespectful fashion.

It starts off well, with a seemingly idyllic marriage: Laura (Roberts) is fishing for clams on the beach, they've got a gorgeous house by the sea and Roberts basically looks the part of the beautiful wife. However, things start going downhill as soon as hubby starts beating up his wife and Laura hops a bus out of town with a new identity. Right from the very start you can see what's going to happen. Anyone who's watched a few of these movie's knows that when we're told Laura can't swim that it's going to pop up as a plot later on, or that when she flushes her ring down the toilet her husband is going to find it later and realise that she's not really dead.

As soon as Laura leaves to start her new life things take an inexplicable change of pace as she romances sickly drama teacher Ben. She bakes apple pie for him and there's a montage where she tries on hats. Wasn't this Roberts trying to prove herself? The audience is certainly likely to forget that here, with Laura putting up only minimal resistance to Ben's advances. Worse still we're not given a glimpse of why Laura stayed with him for all these years other than being told that he didn't used to be like this.

After the interlude however we're back into revenge drama as Laura's psychotic husband tracks her down to a market town in Iowa. Unfortunately his revenge seems to mostly consist of straigtening towels in her bathroom and rearranging cans in the cupboard. Any hint of psychological drama is almost entirely down to the actors themselves, who are left pretty much to defend for themselves with an unoriginal script that both looks and feels like a TV drama.

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Scissor-Cut Look at Abuse
With the beginning scene in "Sleeping With the Enemy" of a nice, handsome husband and a beautiful, smiling wife living in a lovely, rich house, this movie soon breaks the stereotype perception of an abusive relationship by showing that everything that glitters is not necessarily gold.

Julia Roberts, with a combination of a sense of planning and cleverness, fear and hope, and a desperate will to survive, does the only thing she can - she leaves while faking her own death. (Any abused man or woman will probably be mesmerized by some of the scenes and the feelings evoked in this intense movie.)

The new lifestyle she slowly, but surely creates for herself, against the backdrop of her husband piecing together her escape and his savage determination to find her creates a savvy suspense thriller that could be a classic in anyone's home movie library.

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One major blooper...
Unless she knew that her husband was going to force her to go on a boat or that she set up something with the guy who owned the boat why would she be taking swimming lessons?

I liked the movie, glad I rented it - but wouldn't own it.