Film Review: Peppermint

Peppermint feels like one of those junky, low budget action movies from the early 2000s, complete with weird editing effects, metal heavy soundtrack, poor attempts at nonlinear storytelling and genre subversion, and the deeply unsettling racial politics that would’ve gone largely unnoticed at the time but would sour future revisits. Except, it’s not one of those movies, it’s an actual 2018 release, directed by Taken helmer, Pierre Morel, and written by Chad St. John, that plays a lot of these elements with a straight face, and the film suffers as a result.

The film is about Riley North (Jennifer Garner), a woman who was the victim of a drive by shooting that claimed the lives of her husband and young daughter. Despite her efforts, the killers never went to trial, and she proceeded to go off the grid for five years. After that time has passed, Detectives Carmichael (John Gallagher Jr.) and Moises (John Ortiz) notice a pattern in recent deaths that all point to Riley, taking her revenge on the people that wronged her.

With that simple and frankly, generic, premise, you think you know every beat the film is going to take. However, the film throws you for a loop, but it’s not necessarily in a good way. After we get the incident, we jump ahead five years as the Detectives head into a crime scene where Riley has already taken her revenge against the men who pulled the trigger. What is usually the most interesting part of these revenge movies – the transition from the everyman (or everywoman in this case) to gun-toting vigilante – is nowhere to be found here. We cut from Riley as a loving, average mom to being a cold, resourceful killer with no look into her journey. Not providing the catharsis of seeing her brutalize her family’s killers is one thing, but it’s such a bizarre choice to not even provide insight into what is going through her mind, which a somewhat similar film from 2005 starring Jodie Foster, The Brave One, does a really good job at.  Taking that psychological aspect out completely puts a barrier between her character and the audience, making it extremely difficult to empathize with her.

So, the movie doesn’t work, but it’s made worse by its racist undercurrent, playing on the kind of hatred for the Latinx community that will rile up the MAGA crowd. Hell, their headquarters is literally a piñata factory. The cartel is the force behind the villains here, so what you end up getting is a series of sequences where Riley shoots her way through brown people, and portraying all other non-gangbanger POC as either clueless authority figures or helpless victims who require saving from our white hero. Moises is the token POC who has some semblance of agency, but he accomplishes nothing and he serves no other purpose. She does eliminate some white lawyers and judges for their corruption, but it’s so thinly drawn that it’s pretty clear the film only offers them up as bad guys to be disposed because they inconvenienced her as opposed to them being a part of a much larger systematic problem that allows bad people to get away with crimes.

Jennifer Garner serves as the one bright spot in the entire film. Unfortunately, because the film lacks that one huge character building element, as if an entire reel is just missing, she doesn’t get to really do anything aside from a few kinda nifty action beats, but they mean nothing because we haven’t spent significant time with her. That said, she is still fun to watch. She handles herself well in the action scenes, and she even gets a few killer lines. I had a nice chuckle at her delivery of “I’m going to set your house on fire with you in it,” which, oddly enough, is aimed at a character who was just an asshole to her once back in her old life. That’s kind of the weird priorities this movie has, and Garner tries her absolute best to sell these undercooked narrative choices, even if her efforts are ultimately made in vain.

I don’t mind a nasty and morally dubious revenge movie every now and then, but they do have to be good on some level. Peppermint isn’t good. It’s poorly constructed, thin on character and story, and its action beats aren’t creative or outrageous enough to overcome those flaws. Adding the troubling racial elements on top of that pushes the film to borderline reprehensible, and it’s a shame considering Garner makes for a compelling action hero, almost single-handedly making the movie watchable, but she – and the audience – deserves better than this kind of outdated junk.