Peppermint, Jennifer Garner’s vigilante flick about a mother seeking justice after the brutal murder of her family, is as frustrating as it is disappointing. When you’re not shaking your head at plot inconsistencies, poorly drawn characters and lamentable dialogue, you’ll no doubt feel let down that such a brilliant action actress made her return to the genre in such a lemon.
The film starts with a jolting sequence that seems to communicate an ultra-gritty and harsh story is to follow. We open with a shot of the Los Angeles skyline just before dawn, as the camera slowly zooms in on a lone parked car. As we get closer, it becomes obvious that car's shaking, and just as we’re questioning whether what’s going on inside is romantic or not, we smash cut to Jennifer Garner in a brutal fight with an unknown assailant. She eventually gets the upper hand, and before she ends his life, she says, “You don’t remember me do you?” Spoiler alert: he doesn’t, and she kills him. Then she gets out of the car and methodically puts him in the trunk. It’s a scene that’s utterly devoid of sentimentality and invests us in Riley North and her terrifying mission.
Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there.
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Almost immediately after the intro, we flash back to North’s convoluted, yet unimaginative vigilante origin story. Its bones are basic – North witnesses her family being shot in a drive-by and vows revenge when the system fails her. But the movie feels the need to deify North in our eyes presumably in an effort justify her later actions, so her identity as a suburban mom driven to vigilante justice is embellished with a cliched, melodramatic backstory. Her family is a group of angelic, blue collar underdogs who’d be at home in a Hallmark movie. After they’re killed (in a seriously tone deaf sequence that stops short of showing a seven-year-old getting shot), she can identify the shooters, but a corrupt system allows them to get off. Justice is thwarted by a nefarious tag team of a predatory defense attorney and a morally bankrupt judge, and North winds up losing it in an court room after the suspects aren’t even indicted.
You’d have to be an android not to feel something for North after sitting through such a Job-worthy tale of woe, but that’s due to Garner’s performance rather than a backstory that feels like a mish-mash of the broadest comic book tropes. In fact, Garner is the only real reason to see this movie, and the only thing about it that’s even remotely satisfying.
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In the midst of heavy-handed writing and a supporting cast of two-dimensional villains, Garner makes a pretty breathtaking return to her action roots. She nails the sweet spot between vulnerability and deadly determination that made us fall in love with Alias 15 years ago. While the movie completely mishandles everything surrounding Riley’s experiences, Garner imbues her with real emotional honesty and creates the only complex character in the movie. She moves fluidly between the woman’s merciless hatred for those who have wronged her and North’s utter and heartbreaking despair.
It’s a huge pleasure to see Garner return to the genre she masters so well, and gives us hope she’ll do more in the future. To its credit, the movie does give Garner most of the spotlight, so there are genuine moments of enjoyment in as North roundly defeats enemies in some truly spectacular confrontations (the piñata store shootout was particularly dope). But at the end of the day, her enemies’ real crime is just not being that interesting, so eventually even well-executed action sequences feel like watching Sydney Bristow go up against Lord Zed from The Power Rangers.
No matter how compelling Garner is, she can’t save Peppermint from its real problem – the fact that it doesn’t have anything to say. At different points it lamely tosses out platitudes about the nature of vengeance and the problems with vigilante justice, and even tries to clunkily implement a social media subplot that sees North galvanizing mob justice by live streaming her last stand. Much is made of #crimeTwitter trying to dissect North’s whereabouts, offering opinions on her plight, but mostly cheering her on (despite the fact that she regularly engages in activity that endangers innocent bystanders). The first half the movie details Riley’s suffering at the hands of a gross miscarriage of justice while the second half seems to come down in favor of mob justice, which is arguably just as irresponsible.
The end result is a diluted Punisher imposter, with all of the guns and none of the insight. The only cogent thing Peppermint has to say about vengeance is that it’s fine to take matters into your own hands if you can beat kill all the right bad guys and Twitter's on your side. And that’s a shame considering the efficacy of Jennifer Garner’s performance. If this movie did nothing else, it reminded us just how good she really is at this kind of thing. Fingers crossed it’ll inspire someone to crowdfund an Alias reboot.