Peppermint‘s cheap thrills can’t cover its stench
In Peppermint, the dismal action director Pierre Moral (The Gunman, Taken) delivers a dumb, ugly revenge story, the likes of which can only be slightly redeemed by its commitment to violence.
Jennifer Garner stars working mom Riley North, who we first meet with her 10-year old daughter in a humiliating retreat back to their car in a strip mall parking lot over a girl scout cookie turf war with a shrill, villainous LA mom (blah blah blah judgment, PTA meetings, high heels; you’ve seen this scene before you’ve seen it). Meanwhile, the husband Chris struggles to make ends meet as a mechanic, as evidence by him looking down at a pile of bills and sighing. Here, Chris’s coworker approaches to suggest they go ahead and pull off a quick, one time robbery of the city’s most prominent drug lords. “Think about your daughter,” the coworker says. Right.
The evening reaches its first bland crescendo when Riley comes home after a long shift at the bank, expecting that they’ve won the neighborhood over with their daughter’s triumphant 10th birthday party and instead finds her entire family murdered by the Mexican drug cartel! (Unfortunately, I’m kidding. That comes later.) The first tragedy is that nobody showed up to Caty’s party, which we are meant to interpret as a symptom of the family’s other failures to keep up with the Jones’s, I guess? “Things are going to get better,” Chris whispers in Riley’s ear, but how the birthday party fail and the apparent cataclysm of a two-income household intersect remains unclear.
Anyway, Chris calls his friend and says the robbery is off, the family goes to a nearby Christmas carnival, the kid orders peppermint ice-cream (Hey, it’s the title of the movie), and THEN, on the way back to the car, in a slow motion drive by shooting perpetrated by a couple of Mexican thugs with tattoos on their face, father and daughter are gunned down in slow motion, and now the rampage of bloody revenge against every last man responsible can commence.
These first scenes are empirically terrible, but things pick up a bit once we cut to five years later—a five year stint presumably filled with soul searching and cage fighting that I think we all would have liked to have seen, but never mind. Garner’s living in a van in LA’s Skid Row, where she plots out her revenge campaign and also serves as guardian angel to the city’s neglected homeless population. From here, the story follows a classic construction of Riley versus a bunch of Mexicans, intercut with a police force conflicted by the task of arresting a vigilante out for righteous justice, who we are told has “a lot of support on social media.”
To reiterate, nothing that happens in this movie is particularly original, thrilling or good. Many people might point to the nearly all Mexican body count, but I think the real racism comes from the film’s implicit assumption that this white woman’s pain is the grief to end all grief. Sure, other lives have been destroyed by the Mexican cartel, but Riley loved her family the most!
Garner’s a Neutrogena/Capital One card spokeswoman first and foremost and her work here never really transcends the dimples. It’s a poorly written role, but also, she sucks. Still, some of screenwriter Chad St. John’s dialogue and gaping police procedural inaccuracies are so outlandishly bad that we are moderately entertained. Cop 1: “It’s the FBI, they wanna talk to us.” Cop 2: “The Feds?” Some of the best comedies are written by people who didn’t know they wrote a comedy.