It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

I'm not a fan of Julia Roberts (or Patrick Bergin, for that matter) and watching this film again after some years reminded me why. To be fair, it was still quite early on in Robert's career, and it's obvious that she was still trying to find her place in Hollywood and a foothold as an actor.Sleeping With The Enemy is a very good film, with what has to be one of Bergin's strongest performances. A somewhat underrated actor, he carries much of the film alone. His performance of the abusive, controlling and manipulative husband is very believable. He really does come across as a genuinely evil character. Julia Robert's performance lacks confidence, so consequently she is just dithering along for most of the film, and Kevin Anderson doesn't really deserve a mention. In fact, you could take out Anderson's part/ character and it wouldn't really affect the film.On a whole Sleeping With The Enemy is well worth watching; it's from a time when Hollywood was still trying to come up with something good (on occasion). Yes, there are holes, it's predictable and it may not be all that realistic, but it's very well acted, scripted, shot and even has a great, memorable score.What more could you want?

This is a thrilling and exciting movie about a woman, Laura (Laura Roberts) who fakes her own death in a boating accident in order to escape her physically abusive husband, Martin (Patrick Bergin).The suspense in this movie builds as we see the controlling and abusive behavior of Martin to Laura finally finding the opportunity to escape and hiding traces of her actually surviving the boating accident. Laura hiding out in a small town in Iowa makes the audience wonder if she is really safe and when/if Martin might be on to her scheme, providing enough intrigue to make the movie go at an exciting pace. The plot does drag a little when Laura meets Ben (Kevin Anderson), and the two of them at the theater scene is a little sappy. But, overall it's still an exciting movie, with a heart-pounding climax.Grade A-

I enjoyed this movie on a few levels, and there where things that I found totally unbelievable. The story line is basic: an abused woman who flees from her abuser, the enemy, who happens to be her husband. I picked up something watching a second time. It was when the abused woman (Julia Roberts) calls her mother who was blind and in a care facility. The main character said she had a job and was making her own money. It made me think that possibly the reason she may have remained in the abusive relationship was because she didn't know if she could make it on her own (support herself) without him. She was young and beautiful, but basically uneducated. She is wined and dined by a rich, handsome, powerful man (a policeman) that she marries, thinking he was her prince charming and she his princess. His OCD and lack of ability to view her as a human but only as a possession means a horrible existence for her, filled with fear, as he beats her and completely controls every aspect of her life. She plans her escape and waits for the opportunity, and then it presents itself. Here is where the plot begins to become unbelievable to me. When the impromptu opportunity arises, and time is of her essence for her to make her escape, she takes the time to cut her hair, change her clothes, throw her wedding ring in the toilet, and basically leave a ton of clues that she didn't perish the way he was going to think she perished.This is possibly her once in a lifetime opportunity to get away from this monster and she risks it by taking time at their home doing things that could easily have waited. Of course, she finds a love interest in a town far away. But I think the movie failed to really show the fall-back of women who have been abused for years. I think it would have been much harder that they portrayed it and I think she would have looked over her shoulder for years, possibly always. Forget about sitting on the front porch so soon after she escaped. I also didn't believe the mother daughter relationship. Maybe it was her grandmother and I missed it? Anyway, it lacked believability. And even though the mother didn't know the husband, she did know her daughter had to show up in male disguise to see her and had flown for her life and still harboring fear of being recognized and it getting back to him somehow. As a mother, I would have been way too hesitant to talk to someone who just showed up in my room asking questions about my kid without knowing exactly who I was speaking with. This mother just handed up the info and every detail to the psycho husband. Yes, I know she couldn't see him, but she knew enough about the situation to have been on guard.Lastly, in the final scene when she calls the police to report she had just shot an intruder, why not simply say the truth. She had just shot her husband? Ben was there to back things up (albeit he had been knocked out by the husband). Was this abused woman ever going to get her real identity back now? I thought this could have been much better by being more realistic.

In all honesty, this movie struck me as a bit flat, both in terms of plot and performances. To begin with, I'm not the biggest fan of Julia Roberts in the first place. I've had some mixed reactions to her work. She's been in a couple of good films, but much that I've seen has disappointed me. "Sleeping With The Enemy" has to rank in that "disappointing" category.It's cliché driven from beginning to end, and it hits every note possible in the story of an abused woman. Roberts character of Laura Burney qualifies on that count, married to a violent OCD-driven husband (played by Patrick Bergin) who controls every aspect of her life and makes her live in fear. Faking her own death, Laura escapes his clutches, moves to a small town in Iowa under an assumed name and, of course, falls in love with a nice guy (Kevin Anderson) - except that you know hubby has to be planning to show up. I'll grant that Roberts was the best part of a cast that really didn't inspire me very much.The movie is at times a bit slow paced, but in the last twenty minutes or so it does have all the required chills for this kind of movie, and there's some suspense about how it's all going to turn out. Still, for the most part it was a rather uninspired effort which left a lot to be desired. (5/10)