Enough/YMMV


 * Cliché Storm
 * Complete Monster: Mitch is shamelessly written as this.
 * Roger Ebert derided the film for making Mitch so thoroughly and one-dimensionally Bad, it renders him nothing like an actual person. He's more like a live action Captain Planet villain.
 * Fridge Logic: Did it never occur to Slim to go a battered women's shelter?
 * Also, why does Mitch desire Slim to remain with him at all? Clearly he only values women for sex, and he gets that from multiple mistresses.
 * This troper got the gist that Mitch always wanted to be in full control. Remember that scene where Mitch seemingly saves Slim from that grabby customer. Fast forward some scenes later, you find out that the guy is actually crooked cop Mitch is paying off. Even though it is pretty ridiculous, it showed that he wanted full control from the beginning. Mitch only wanted her because he saw her as a possession and nothing more.
 * There's also the fact that killing him seems to be the only solution. Beating him up delivers a delicious dish of revenge but after that bit of fun surely there are other means (legal or illegal) of taking him of the picture properly. Methods that don't risk her child growing up without any parents her whole life with one in the ground and one serving a life sentence. If the cops weren't so useless that would have been a very likely outcome of her actions.
 * As for not going to a shelter, she probably feared (correctly) that it wouldn't take him long to find her there (remember how we soon see that he has connections everywhere).
 * Not that we ever get to see how come he's so ridiculously well-connected, mind you...
 * Mary Sue: Slim.
 * Moral Dissonance: While the movie established that Mitch was pretty-much a baby-eating monster who if given half the chance would Kick the Dog down the street... Slim premeditated his murder, broke into his house, initiated a fight, and isn't even arrested (the police proved to be thoroughly useless by that point). Of course, as the tagline suggests "Self defence isn't murder". Nevermind that it sorta stops being self defense when you break into someone's house to beat them to death with your bare hands.
 * Of course we mean it's not legally self-defense. In context, where he was tracking down acrss the country trying to murder her, her pulling the same game on him is defense of the self.
 * No, it's still premeditated murder, it's just premeditated murder with motive and what you can argue to a judge and jury or the audience as extenuating circumstances. If he showed up at her house and started beating her, and she beat him to death, then it would be self defense legally and morally. The fact that she went to his home and initiated the combat would, by all legal rights and arguably morally, eliminate the argument that it was self defense. (She might still get off, especially with a sympathetic jury and a lawyer likely arguing "Abused women aren't responsible for their own actions", but that would actually be a miscarriage of justice and an endorsement of vigilantism at the least.)
 * Narm Factor Nine, Captain!:
 * Although it's apparently intended to be serious, as Roger Ebert noted, Mitch is a completely absurd, Flanderized caricature of an abusive husband; not just a hybridization of Germaine Greer's worst nightmare, and Godzilla in human form, he's also, for the purposes of the plot, practically omnipotent. The scene where he rampages through the house of Slim's terrified parents is particularly amusing. Mitch himself may not necessarily be in it For the Evulz (he's generally shown to be angry), but that's no reason for us in the audience not to be.
 * Slim suddenly has a self-defense coach, who teaches her and her alone, and even briefly narrates the final fight as if to say "use the force".
 * Jennifer Lopez and Julette Lewis' joint-catchphrase. "Piece of cake" "Piece of Pie". Repeated numerous times throughout the film, towards the end they even abbreviate it to the non-sequitur "Cake" "Pie"
 * The Scrappy: Gracie.
 * Unfortunate Implications: J-Lo -- sorry, "Slim" -- says she's "not the kind of woman whose husband beats her up." So, wait, there is a kind of woman whose husband beats her? And that woman should probably just take it, because that's the kind of woman she is?
 * It's the kind of "how did my life end up here" thought that battered women would have, but it's executed as terribly as everything else in this film.
 * You Fail Logic Forever