![]() ![]() The movie begins auspiciously with the camera craning down to a car with fogged-up windows, faintly rocking, creating the mild impression of sex before finally cutting to the interior, where Garner is tussling with an attacker before finally killing him. Morel does show some improvement as an action director. This is a mother’s rage, after all something to be cherished and encouraged at any cost. But the movie could have ameliorated this much better by, I don’t know, not having Garner mow down countless brown-skinned folks with her expertly curated arsenal, a compromise Morel was clearly unwilling to make or think about. Peppermint tries to ameliorate the fact that most of her targets are remorseless Latino criminals with crooked judges, sketchy lawyers, and the fact that her (white) husband got them into this mess in the first place, as well as providing a sympathetic cop played by John Ortiz (most of the other good guys, for that matter, are non-white). When the murderers aren’t punished for their crimes, Riley goes off the grid, trains for years (something that happens offscreen without so much as a montage), and returns to exact her revenge. So it’s not that Riley North (Garner) is, say, a former black-ops soldier or even a cop she’s just a hard-working bank teller consumed with grief when her husband and young daughter are murdered by drug dealers. ![]() ![]() Seeing her return to ass-kicking carries Peppermint further than it should really be allowed to go, especially on the back of its relentless quasi-motivational cynicism-also predicated on Garner’s mom bona fides.Īt this point, the notion of a parent (especially a mom) so adrenalized by a threat to their child that they can lift a school bus has become nearly as gospel to screenwriters as the idea that humans only use 10 percent of their brain. Garner had her big breakthrough as a spy on Alias, but in movies, apart from an attempt to franchise her Elektra character from the misbegotten Daredevil movie, she has branched out to rom-coms and, most recently, as a super-mom, presumably an intersection of her own interests as a mother and Hollywood’s interests in having any actress over 28 play one. (Putting Helen Mirren in a couple of action franchises as a jape doesn’t count.) But now, Garner’s time to kill has arrived with Peppermint, which does not come from the Luc Besson-Eurotrash action factory but is directed by Taken’s Pierre Morel. This has become such a reliable formula that it’s remarkable, really, that it took so long for a respected middle-aged actress like Jennifer Garner to get her own action movie where she hunts down remorseless bad guys. We can talk about our favorite moments in Mad Max: Fury Road or the John Wick series, but has there been a more influential semi-recent action film than Taken? The Luc Besson-produced potboiler about Liam Neeson-and only Liam Neeson-realizing the mortal danger of allowing his daughter to travel abroad and go to a U2 concert was a big hit, and did such a great job of creating a second career for Neeson as a late-period ass-kicker that plenty of similarly overqualified actors followed suit. ![]()
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