Review of Peppermint (2018) by Russell R — 17 Dec 2018

Shaking my head. So this is about a woman who is a wife and mother (Jennifer Garner). Her family isn't exactly living comfortably, but they are getting by. Everything gets taken from her on one fateful night of a drive-by shooting.

To add insult to injury, the criminals that gunned down her family are set free. It is time for her to take justice into her own hands, delivering vengeance to any and everyone who ruined her life. Now it isn't too difficult to see what they are going for with this: they want this to be Taken with a female lead.

So, naturally, you get the person who helmed and directed Taken. This is all you need to do to have a success story... right? Peppermint is very paint by numbers, and on paper, it is just a bland revenge film that is indistinguishable from everything you've seen before.

You know what is going to happen before it happens at every turn, and because of that, you're going to start tuning out at a number of different points throughout. This movie is a whole mess of problems, but the biggest sin it commits is that it is pretty racist when you break it down; it could very well be considered to be a propaganda film against anybody who is a little bit brown.

Anybody who is of Hispanic descent in this is not only a criminal, but a dangerous gang murderer as well, accompanied with the dangerous looks and facial tattoos galore. This movie plays on stereotypes, and I don't know if it was intentionally trying to set Latinos back two decades or if it happened accidentally, but regardless, this film does a massive disservice.

On top of everything, this is just sloppy. I was at the very least expecting the flow to go from tragedy to training to revenge, but they went ahead and made all the training happen off-screen. I am not exaggerating when the police play a rough home video of her boxing oversees and say, "Oh, she's been training for five years, Jennifer Garner is suddenly badass!" This is literally what happens over the span of three minutes in the movie to explain why this normal suburban woman all of the sudden has military grade combat training.

Peppermint is a pretty terrible movie, and apart from Garner giving an earnest effort, I don't have anything good to say about it.