Have I talked about the September crap yet? The dumping ground of movies that the studio doesn’t know what to do with, so they release them in September. Why September? Most people are busy with back to school, and ain’t got time for the movies. The only people watching are those of us who’ll see anything and everything, so the studios don’t even try to put out anything good. Peppermint was just another in the trend.
Srsly, what’s a good gotta do to get a good ultraviolent action movie? I’m grateful that a girl finally got one of those movies, but it wasn’t good. Jennifer Garner stars (sidebar: why is this movie called Peppermint?) was a mother seeking revenge for her murdered daughter and husband. I’ll cut right to it, this is a total mess.
There’s timeline issues. I can forgive the blurry intro timelines. How long was she in the hospital? How long did the trial take? Where/how did she do her training. All could be forgiven if the rest of the pieces were in place, but they weren’t. Even the timing within the film, the third act was expanded to be way too long. We skipped over smaller baddie murders in order to focus on the big bad. I woulda been more interested with those proportions reversed.
The setup itself is problematic. Why does a woman need to go thru the unspeakable in order to be made strong? Again, I could forgive that if we got a truly badass ass kicking mama bear, but her fights felt very tame. No breathtaking choreo or personality in her attitude. You coulda switched out the character and/or actress partway thru and I’d have never noticed.
The execution was cheesy. Cheesy is one way to go, and you can work with it with some intention. This was not intended so it drastically reduced the impact of the film.
The story was so cliche. Underworld, dirty cops, blah blah blah. We’ve seen this a thousand times, why do we hafta focus there?
Now the reason I can tear this apart so easily is because I really do love this genre. And I was really excited to see a leading lady take it over. But utlimately it felt like the powers that be felt that a lady was enough of a differentiator that they didn’t need to put much more creative force into the film. It was such a waste of potential (and we know Garner has a lot of action potential) and frankly a waste of everyone’s time.
Pepperming – \m/ \m/