Todd Gilchirst of The Wrap asks whether it’s “a good idea in 2018 for almost every one of the villains in the film to be written as and portrayed by Latino,” concluding “Probably not, but it’s easy.” Lauding Garner’s acting chops and “special set of skills,” reviewers mostly found the action flick lackluster, with some finding fault with its seemingly timely politics. With an abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score, it’s clear critics have not taken kindly to it. From Taken director Pierre Morel, Peppermint follows Riley’s revenge spree all around LA, from piñata stores to Skid Row, leaving few standing bodies in her wake. That means targeting not just the corrupt judge and lawyers that helped the three gang members go free but the drug cartel they belong to. Five years after the tragedy that forever changed her, she returns to Los Angeles as a cut-throat assassin intent on taking out everyone and everything that denied her young girl the justice she deserves. After losing her husband and daughter at the hands of three gang members, Riley North (Garner) sets out to exact revenge on her own. That seems to be the selling point and inspiration for Jennifer Garner’s new film Peppermint. Find her on Twitter at or drop her a line at. Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Denver Film Critics Society. “Peppermint” is great (except for that title), and it makes me want more. Now I want to see Garner as a former Marine who needs to rescue her kidnapped daughter, or a cop who teams up with a streetwise grifter to take down the mob. The best comes in a scene featuring one of her mortal enemies from her life as a suburban mom, a darkly hilarious moment that anyone who’s had to deal with the PTA will understand on a deep level. Garner gets a few killer lines, and she delivers every one of them beautifully. There’s also a low-key but very real sense of humor. John pour into “Peppermint” is hardly a given in the action movie genre. There’s nothing revolutionary here, but the kind of craftsmanship Morel and screenwriter Chad St. That’s bad for them, but deeply entertaining for those of us in the audience.ĭirector Pierre Morel plays with a few audience expectations as well, from the opening scene to the characterization of some of the supporting cast. She uses their expectations against them multiple times, creating an enemy that they never seem to see coming. She falls, bleeds and gets thrown around a lot, but she’s also intelligent, incredibly tough, and obsessively focused. The choreography is fantastic, the set-ups are clever, and all of it strikes the balance between relative realism and visual interest. Garner traces that fall fearlessly, creating a believable, compelling thread between the happy wife and mother we see earlier and the deeply damaged killing machine we know now.Ĭonveniently, the movie also delivers killer action scenes. She’s fantastic with emotions, and watching her as a happy, loving, well-adjusted woman fills you with absolute dread because we’ve already seen the woman she collapses into. It’s absolutely heartbreaking to watch, thanks in large part to Garner’s performance. The movie opens with a brutal, efficient, and faintly humorous fight that soon slides into the backstory of how Garner’s character got to be where she is. The cops and the FBI realize what’s happening and try to stop her, but it turns out that public opinion may be on her side. When the system fails her and sets the gunmen free, she disappears for five years and returns as a brutally efficient killing machine that systematically tracks down and executes everyone who was involved in her family’s death. Here, she’s a wife and mother whose husband and daughter are gunned down due to an unfortunate brush with criminal activity. The mom-with-a-vengeance storyline is done satisfyingly and well, but Garner could just as easily pull off any one of a dozen other action movie tropes that male actors have been pulling off for years. I’d also love to see more action movies from Garner, who transitions from “Hollywood’s New Favorite Mom” to a killing machine that manages to be both surprisingly believable and utterly heartbreaking. Hollywood, please make Jennifer Garner the new Liam Neeson.ĭespite a name that seems to belong to a different, less interesting movie, “Peppermint” is exactly the kind of well-made, somewhat thoughtful action movie I’d love to see more of. The run time of "Peppermint" is about 1 hour and 42 minutes.
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