Jennifer Garner is probably past her glory days. So does Pierre Morel. Garner decided to focus on family films and her own family before Ben Affleck began to do things behind her back, and Morel not only failed to repeat the success of the first 96 hours but also did not live up to them in terms of quality. The two are already playing in the second league, and probably no one expected anything major from their collaboration. And nothing major came out of Peppermint. On the other hand, at the right time and in the right mood, you can quite enjoy this movie. Or at least I did.
Peppermint looks like something someone pulled out of the mid-nineties, when lone Avengers and Avengers were flying around, and uprooting someone’s family in the first fifteen minutes was common and downright desirable in the action genre. That’s exactly what happens here. Sympathetic mother Riley loses her husband and little daughter, corrupt representatives of justice make a fool of her in court, and she takes the corner. Just so she could train honestly and practice with weapons and fight in the ring for a few years and come home and mow down everyone who had a hand in the tragedy that ruined her life. And he wants to crown it by liquidating the local drug cartel.
If you are expecting a twist, news, or surprise now, you are waiting in vain. Peppermint lays the cards on the table early on and you either enjoy it or you don’t. The movie is as silly as any Seagal or Van Damme movie, and even when Morrel and Garner try to give it some depth by moralizing and pondering whether it’s a good idea to cut up a bunch of drug dealers and then hang them on a Ferris wheel, it doesn’t really work. Luckily, Peppermint doesn’t try to cover up the B’s roots anymore and it’s nice to know that we’ll get quite a lot of action and Morel is still a skilled craftsman in this regard. The fact that the main character behaves logically as much as possible, has no problem shooting unarmed people in the back, and does not rush into battle to feel that she has given her opponents a chance because she knows that they usually give her a solid smile, is also pleasant.
Garner still has action scenes and reminds us of the days of Alias ​​or Kingdom, but at the same time she manages to act in a small space, and you believe her desperate and determined mother. Of course, we’re still moving in B-movie waters, where the creators deal more with emotions than with how it would look if someone shot someone’s leg with a shotgun from two meters away, but it’s a nice bonus. The main character and her representative seem an order of magnitude more believable and sympathetic than Zoe Saldana in the half-forgotten Colombiana.
If this female variation on The Punisher didn’t run out of steam and if she didn’t sometimes try to unnecessarily bite into motives that seem unnecessary and often even ridiculous, I would probably enjoy it even more. But within the “little money, a lot of shooting” genre, it’s still an above-average B-level old-school craft. I’m just afraid that there aren’t many people today who will be able to enjoy it despite its stupidity.
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