Mark Reviews Movies: PEPPERMINT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 7, 2018

Chad St. John's screenplay breezes past everything that might make Peppermint even slightly intriguing. It's a standard revenge story, and the movie's primary hook is that its protagonist is a woman. Such tales are usually an arena for men, who have been trained for violence or pushed into becoming violent and must exact vengeance for some terrible loss. Save for some back story told in a flashback, which almost seems as if it filmed as an afterthought, there's nothing that sets Riley North (Jennifer Garner) apart from her generic male counterparts in movies such as this one.

This means that even the movie's slightly unique hook is undone by its insistence on getting right to the action. It literally does, with an opening scene that shows Riley fighting with and killing a man in a car (There's a visual gag as the camera moves toward the car, which is rocking and has foggy windows, making us think that one thing is happening—and also that the setup to the joke might have been lost in the editing room, just so the filmmakers can get to the violence as quickly as possible).

Riley is a woman of two extremes: a loving mother and a ruthless killer. There is nothing between these two states—nothing transitional to show us how she went from one mode to the other. After all, such details or character development might mean that St. John and director Pierre Morel would have to the delay the action just a bit longer.

What we do learn, after she takes a swig of booze from the bottle and staples up a knife wound, is that Riley was a fairly ordinary woman. Five years before her killing spree begins, she was a mother to her daughter Carly (Cailey Fleming) and a wife to Chris (Jeff Hephner). All of that changes—on the daughter's birthday, no less—when Chris considers stealing money from a local drug dealer named Diego Garcia (Juan Pablo Raba). Chris bails on the plan at the last minute—but not before Diego learns about it. He sends a trio of gang members to kill Chris, and Carly is killed in the shooting, too.

The usual miscarriage of justice, necessary for such stories to have a slightly less shaky moral standing, proceeds all of this, with Riley making an outburst in the courtroom when the three killers aren't even brought to trial. She has been failed by the police, as Det. Carmichael (John Gallagher Jr.) is hamstrung by Diego's hold on some corrupt cops, and the judicial system, as the prosecutor and the judge are on the drug lord's payroll. Now, five years later, Riley, who once told her daughter that violence against even bad people makes you just as bad as them, is out to kill everyone who murdered her family and stood in the way of seeing justice served.

That's all in terms of story, and it's also all there is to understanding Riley. The specifics of her transformation from upstanding citizen to brutal killer are hinted at with the help of an otherwise useless FBI agent (played by Annie Ilonzeh), who tells Carmichael and his partner Beltran (John Ortiz) how Riley moved across the globe over the past five years. She showed up on Interpol's radar occasionally—a few injuries in Hong Kong and a bare-knuckle boxing match in London.

All that matters, really, is that Riley has become an efficient fighter and a quite ruthless killer (She nails the judge's hands to his desk and wraps him up with explosive rope). She also has occasional visions of her murdered daughter, which is either a lazy screenwriting trick or the symptoms of untreated mental health issues (She's prescribed some anti-psychotic drugs after her family is murdered). That we're never sure is simply another sign of how little the movie cares about anything beyond cheap, violent thrills.

Looking at it in those terms, the movie doesn't provide anything new, and its action sequences amount to a lot of frantically staged shooting and bloodletting in assorted locations—a fancy house and a piñata factory, which is admittedly distinctive (and also telling, since the overwhelming majority of the bad guys here are of Hispanic ethnicity and, since they're of even less importance to the filmmakers, bordering on ugly stereotypes). Eventually, the gang starts hunting Riley, and the vigilante becomes something of a social media star. Obviously, the movie does nothing with the potential social commentary regarding its own assertion of this phenomenon, because there are more baddies to be killed and a secret villain to be revealed.

Peppermint would be a pretty mundane exercise, if not for Garner, who does the most that she can with a character who's one-note in both of her modes. The actress displays equal ease in both of those broad personality types—the caring mother and the relentless vengeance-seeker. We can sense the pain behind Riley's mission, which is entirely due to Garner's performance. Morel is too busy figuring out how to make the most of the body count to note what she could have brought to this material.

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