Peppermint
Hey, remember that amazing chunk of film in “Batman Begins” where Bruce Wayne leaves Gotham, and trains with the League of Shadows? Imagine a movie that has a similar structure, but omits that sequence. That is Pierre Morel’s “Peppermint,” a nasty, kind of dull revenge thriller that thinks the violence is all we care about in a film like this.
Jennifer Garner stars as soccer mom Riley North, who works at a bank and has a loving family with husband mechanic Chris (Jeff Hephner) and daughter Carly (Cailey Fleming). On Carly’s birthday, Riley is forced to miss much of Carly’s birthday because of work, and Chris is offered an opportunity to make more money by a co-worker that he eventually turns down. Unfortunately, that opportunity is ripping off a major drug kingpin, and by the time Chris turns it down, he’s already in the gang’s crosshairs. When Carly’s at home party goes south, the family goes to a nearby carnival, and enjoys themselves, before the gang’s triggermen take out Chris and Carly with Riley looking on. When the people who killed her family get off because of a corrupt system, she vanishes, and comes back five years later.
Alright, so I know this is a technicality that doesn’t really need explaining, but I’d be curious if Chad St. John’s original script had any notion of backstory about Riley that would hint at how a mild-mannered mom could mount a one-woman assault so effectively against a Los Angeles drug cartel beyond just five years of travelling the globe getting herself trained up. We know that the film is simply an excuse to bring Garner back to her “Alias” ass-kicking roots, and maybe do something more substantial than “Elektra,” but at least when Liam Neeson took aim at the bad guys in Morel’s “Taken,” and Bruce Wayne returned as Batman in “Begins,” we get some form of exposition as to how, and why, they can do this. Even if it went as high-concept as “The Long Kiss Goodnight” did, something that would make me buy that Riley could pull this off beyond just saying, “Look at the ass-kicking mom” (and she does kick ass), would be helpful. That’s why the “Batman Begins” comparison feels very apt, because yes, we do get an idea of her life in a scene of exposition where law enforcement has tracked her as best she can over the intervening five years, but I’m sorry, I want to see that journey, because it is the most interesting part. The vengeance she gets should be the icing on the cake, not the whole damn cake. And why this movie is so much from the police point-of-view is a big miscalculation that doesn’t really add anything. I mean, we see them as they watch Riley’s social media star rise as people start to figure out the pieces, but it feels like Riley is a supporting player in her own story after a while.
Before watching the movie, the previews made me think of Neil Jordan’s criminally-underrated 2007 thriller, “The Brave One,” with Jodie Foster taking the law into her own hands after her and her husband were attacked, and she was raped and left for dead. What makes that film infinitely better than this one is that it dealt with the psychological toll of the attack on Foster’s character, and charted her actions from there. None of that same interest is in this film, and the result is a low-rent “Death Wish” knock off that wastes the talents of its lead actress, and has nothing of interest to say about violence, surviving violence, and seeking justice. Why did I hope otherwise?
