PEPPERMINT (2018) *

If you think Peppermint is going to be Taken but with Jennifer Garner you are mistaken.  (Get it?  Ms. Taken?  Never mind.)  It’s really Soccer Mom Death Wish.  I can see why you thought that though, since it’s from the director of Taken, Pierre Morel.  However, it seems like Morel forgot everything he knew about directing revenge-fueled action movies.  I mean it’s pretty hard to screw these things up, but Pierre managed to make just about the worst revenge flick I’ve ever seen.

Garner stars as a mother whose family is murdered by the drug cartel.  She positively identifies the killers, but their lawyer tries to buy her silence.  The judge is crooked too, and the killers walk.  Knowing the system is broken, she disappears for five years and returns as an ass-kicking Lady Punisher seeking revenge.

Sounds promising, doesn’t it?  However, all this build-up leads to one big fat fizzle.  What does Garner do when she finally comes back home?  The men who killed her family are just found hanging from a Ferris wheel.  We never see what she did to them.  You’re watching a revenge picture because you want to see the satisfaction of your heroine giving the bad guys their just desserts.  Having their comeuppance occur offscreen is a gross miscalculation on the filmmakers’ part.

Also, we never see Garner’s transformation from soccer mom to badass.  It just sort of happens.  (Again, offscreen.)  It’s such a jarring change that the results are often laughable.

Man, I really wanted to like Peppermint, but it’s just so haphazardly structured and indifferently cobbled together that it’s often a chore to sit through.  The rhythms are all off.  For example, the subplot with the cops who visit Garner’s crime scenes seem to take up more screen time than the action itself.  I guess the movie tried to keep Garner out of the spotlight for much of the second half in an effort to build her up as this mythical force of nature.  Unfortunately, when she isn’t on screen, it all just grinds to a halt.  

Maybe it was the script’s fault.  Most of this is so slapdash that the plot feels more like a bunch of suggestions than an actual movie.  Much is made of the fact that Garner stopped taking anti-psychotic drugs after her family’s death.  Did the lack of prescription medicine cause her to go down the road of vengeance?  Is she truly psychotic?  Or is she merely doing what any mother would do?  We see glimpses of her dead daughter periodically throughout the film that suggests she may be psycho, but there’s no payoff or follow-through.  It’s just another half-baked, thinly-sketched revenge motif the movie brings up and then promptly casts aside in favor of another meaningless subplot.

I want to believe Garner can be a badass.  As someone who has watched Daredevil (and even Elektra) more times than he’d care to say out loud, I have to say it’s certainly possible.  It’s just that the movie is so incompetent you never believe it for a second.  It’s especially laughable when she becomes this folk hero urban legend. 

The problem is she’s just not given enough screen time to make it work.  In fact, Jen’s in this so little that it often feels like one of those Bruce Willis DTV movies where they only had him on set for a few days, so they fill in the plot with a lot of unnecessary side characters to beef up the running time.  There are times where it seems like she’s a supporting character in her own vehicle.

I haven’t even mentioned the action yet, mostly because it’s forgettable.  Only the piñata store shootout has any sort of semblance to a real action movie sequence.  Other than that admittedly crisply-filmed scene, Peppermint is totally devoid of flavor.