Badass mom takes revenge
PEPPERMINT DIRECTOR: CAST:
Pierre Morel
Jennifer Garner, John Gallagher jnr, John Ortiz, Method Man, Richard Cabral, Annie Ilonzeh, Juan Pablo Raba, Tyson Ritter, Pell James, Chris Johnson, Kyla Drew, Caily Fleming
102 min
16 DLV
RUNNING TIME: CLASSIFICATION:
RATING: ★★★✩✩ JENNIFER Garner displays a particular set of skills in the latest actioner directed by Pierre Morel, who resuscitated the vigilante genre with Taken.
Playing the sort of badass character who makes her Sydney Bristow on Alias look delicate, the actress brings an admirable physical commitment to her performance as a mother intent on getting justice after her husband and daughter are murdered. Peppermint lacks subtlety and anything even remotely resembling credibility, but like its heroine, it certainly gets the job done. It’s the sort of picture that would have been boffo on a grindhouse double bill in the 1970s.
Garner’s character, Riley North, doesn’t start out as a lethal assassin. She’s an ordinary Los Angeles housewife, working at a bank and lovingly devoted to her husband Chris (Jeff Hephner) and 10-year-old daughter Carly (Cailey Fleming). The family is having trouble making ends meet, leading Chris to consider joining a friend in a plot to rip off a local drug kingpin, Diego Garcia (Juan Pablo Raba).
Chris backs out at the last minute, but not before the plan has been discovered. During an outing at an amusement park to celebrate Carly’s birthday, he and his daughter are brutally gunned down, with Riley seriously injured as well.
Co-operating with the sympathetic detectives (John Ortiz, John Gallagher jnr) investigating the case, Riley identifies the gunmen (criminals should probably avoid having distinctive facial tattoos) and testifies against them in court, even after receiving a combination bribe offer/ threat from the defence attorney. But the deck is clearly stacked against her, with the obviously corrupt judge dismissing the case. When Riley goes berserk and tries to attack the killers, she’s Tasered and is on her way to a mental hospital when she escapes.
Cut to five years later, which is apparently the amount of time needed to transform oneself into a lean, mean killing machine. The screenplay by Chad St John (London Has Fallen) doesn’t bother to provide any details as to exactly how Riley becomes an expert in hand-to-hand combat and automatic weaponry, among other talents. In any case, she’s back in Los Angeles and immediately begins her vendetta against Garcia and his minions, starting with the three men who murdered her family.
She proves remarkably adept in her mission, showing no mercy as the body count lurches towards the triple digits. The frustrated Garcia, watching his men slaughtered in a series of daring raids, is reduced to giving such orders as “Put this bitch in a box before sunset”!
Along the way, Riley demonstrates that she hasn’t lost her maternal instincts. After an encounter with a young boy and his drunken lout of a father on a city bus, she takes matters into her own hands and shows the errant dad the error of his ways by sticking a gun in his mouth. And after being injured during one of her violent encounters, she briefly takes refuge in the house of a soccer mom who made her life miserable in the past. But not before punching her in the mouth.
Director Morel, who also made the Sean Penn starrer The Gunman (are you sensing a pattern?), stages the ultra-violent proceedings for maximum visceral effect.
| Hollywood Reporter | African News Agency (ANA)