Garner on her own in sloppy Peppermint

Jennifer Garner in Peppermint. Image courtesy STX.

Sympathy for the dull absurdity that is Peppermint belongs solely to Jennifer Garner. Garner gives all she can to a poorly written character, inhabiting the protagonist with verve and tenderness. She reveals the depths of a woman with little left to care about in this world, who is broken by society and becomes convinced of the righteousness of her actions. Garner is the only thing Peppermint has going for it, because what exists around her is dreadful.

Peppermint is designed to be Garner's Taken, even importing the latter movie's director Pierre Morel to helm this one. Not that Garner needed a Taken, as she has 100-plus episodes of Alias to support her action-star credit, but she dives right into the role of working mom turned vigilante Riley North. Following the gang-related murder of her husband (Jeff Hephner) and daughter (Cailey Fleming) and the lack of justice that followed, Riley goes on the run for five years before returning to Los Angeles to exact revenge upon drug lord Diego Garcia (Juan Pablo Raba). She's pursued by a pair of detectives (John Gallagher Jr. and John Ortiz) and an FBI agent (Annie Ilonzeh) as she creates chaos on Garcia's drug operations and easily murders the men who denied her justice. One by one she disposes of Garcia's men, evading traps and fighting against a comically corrupt system.

When these revenge movies work, they often succeed because of simple, direct plots and an interesting lead who can carry mediocre material. Peppermint at least gets the casting right with Garner, but it utterly fails on delivering the former. The film's plot leaps from point to point, opening in a dramatic moment, then bouncing five years back in the past for the rest of the first act, and finally leaping ahead of the moments that lead off the movie. It is as jarring as it sounds, and Peppermint isn't out to disorient audiences, so this casual time shifting is more sloppy than clever. And there is so much backstory the movie tries to squeeze in Morel and screenwriter Chad St. John struggle to separate the necessary pieces against the unnecessary bits. There are character motivations that seem to have been lost in either script revisions or editing, plot details revealed at awkward moments, and narrative lapses that never become resolved. The movie is at least coherent, but it's clunky and ill-fitting of the genre.

One of the recent problems that have plagued revenge flicks, including the god-awful Death Wish reboot from earlier this year, is a push to insert social media into the equation. In a poor attempt to replicate the real-life experience, despite existing in what is otherwise a fantastical world, Peppermint uses social media as the platform as its method of debating Riley's moral compass. Aside from looking fake, the push to have the public evaluate the character's morality is lazy storytelling. Audiences are denied the right to make their own decisions about whether a person who kills people for revenge is a hero or a menace. Peppermint clearly sides with the former and declares Riley in the right for her actions, which removes a lot of the moral complications from the character. And it's not as if she needs vindication for her actions; if she were written with more complexity, she wouldn't care if what she did was right or wrong. To slay monsters, you have to become one, and a character like Riley should embrace that.

Peppermint frustrates because there is a legitimately interesting movie existing on the periphery of the inanity. The movie casually tosses out Riley North's backstory, eliding over five years of combat training, fighting, and clearing out all the crime around the digs in Skid Row (naming is an issue with this film). There's a portrait of her as a saint, honoring her efforts in cleaning up the streets. Yet the movie never shows any of Riley's transformation from working mom to bloodthirsty murder machine. It's fair to respect storytelling efficiency, but alluding to the epic, international adventures of a heartbroken woman is just a waste of a good narrative. And the simple mention of such an extreme change to a character opens far more questions than the movie is comfortable answering. Then again, the odds are strongly against filmmakers behind Peppermint being competent enough to do better than this.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer. 

Rating: R

Run time: 102 minutes

Genre: Action

tl;dr

What Worked: Jennifer Garner

What Sucked: Everything else

Watch Instead: Alias, Kill Bill Vol. 1, Taken