![]() Jennifer Garner, who is said to have done most of her own stunts in the film, tries valiantly to rise above the one-line plot served to her. The only way to stop crime is to go all vigilante, pack some big guns and let loose, never mind that you lost your family the exact same way. Blacks, Mexicans and Asians all belong to gangs. The only good people are the white people. The film makes noises about female empowerment on one hand but sticks to the worst kind of racial profiling on the other. The FBI and the gangsters are both frustrated by her tactics but are unable to do anything to counter them. She’s better informed than both the police and the FBI and knows all their hideouts, going in and out of their dens like a ghost and destroying them with extreme prejudice seemingly at will. The members of the most dreaded gang in Los Angeles are so dumb that they let themselves fall an easy prey to a woman. She’s shown to torture and mutilate her enemies and even bashes up a rich neighbour who never did harm her in any way. Having training and motivation is one thing, actually pulling the trigger is another. ![]() She also successfully robs a gun depot, and acquires a semi-military truck to sleep and hide. Not only does our protagonist become an expert in unarmed close combat, she can take apart guns like an army sniper. We aren’t told how a mild-mannered woman gets transformed into an avenging angel. ![]() No one is spared her wrath as she uses military grade weaponry to unleash hell. and starts killing off everyone involved in her husband’s and daughter’s deaths - from the three goons that actually did it, to the corrupt court officials involved, to corrupt policemen, everyone in the gang and finally the big boss himself. Having learned how to kick butt and handle guns, she comes back to L.A. She’s assigned to a psych ward by the court but escapes and goes off the radar for five years. She identifies the perpetrators but thanks to a corrupt judge and the corrupt legal system, the trio of killers go scot free. He changed his mind but they killed him all the same. She later learns that it’s because her husband was going to take part in a heist against the cartel. Middle class mother Riley North (Jennifer Garner) watched her husband and daughter gunned down by members of a Mexican gang. The film is another indication that Hollywood’s obsession for subverting gender stereotypes is still alive and kicking as the film is part Taken, part John Wick, part Death Wish but has a female star in the lead. Again, wrong way around.Directed by Pierre Morel, who resurrected Liam Neeson’s career with Taken (2008), Peppermint is revenge porn served hot. Then she immediately takes out those directly responsible for her personal trauma first and targets their identikit henchmen second. Peppermint introduces Riley as an avenging angel offing the ethnic criminal contingent of Los Angeles with ruthless efficiency, and then flashes back to her as an overworked suburbanite, which is entirely the wrong way around if we’re supposed to buy into her vigilantism being the result of personal trauma and a failed justice system. At this point she violently executes and publicly displays those responsible for her family’s death and goes to work dismantling the cartel they’re associated with, as Peppermint comically makes no real distinction between MS-13-style street gangs and high-level international trafficking operations – they’re just collapsed into the same vaguely-Latin global menace and presented as such entirely without irony.Īs an example of how generally incompetent this film is, consider the following. Either way, they get away with it, and Riley has an embarrassingly over-the-top courtroom meltdown and disappears.įive years later, Riley returns as a highly-trained martial arts wizard and firearms expert having knocked off the bank she worked for and presumably spent the dough on private tutoring with John Wick. Thanks to corruption or general incompetence or a combination of the two, the justice system fails to do much with the perpetrators despite the fact that their defence attorney visits Riley personally to vaguely threaten her – a fact which she inexplicably fails to mention until the judgment has already been passed. The plot concerns Riley North (Jennifer Garner), a suburban working mother whose cute daughter (Cailey Fleming before she was Judith Grimes) and husband (Jeff Hephner) are gunned down in a drive-by shooting by nondescript Latino gangbangers with face tattoos.
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