JENNIFER Garner (“Elektra”) goes on a one-woman rampage against the Mexican drug cartels in “Peppermint.”
The set-up is pretty formulaic—much like you would like in a made-for-TV movie—as summed up in the official synopsis: “Riley North (Garner) awakens from a coma after surviving a brutal attack that killed her husband and daughter.
When the system shields the murderers from justice, Riley sets out to transform herself from citizen to urban guerrilla.
Channeling frustration into motivation, the young widow spends years in hiding—honing her mind, body and spirit to become an unstoppable force.
Eluding the underworld, the police and the FBI, Riley embarks on a deadly quest to deliver her own personal brand of punishment.”
With a terrific script from Chad St. John who penned “London Has Fallen” and brought to the screen by director Pierre Morel (“Taken”) both must have watched the two “John Wick” films, back-to-back-to-back-to back as once you get past the set-up of Garner’s husband and daughter getting in the line of fire from a drive-by shooting and the pre-requisite courtroom trial, that’s when all hell breaks loose.
All of the action takes place over a 36-hour period when Garner’s North unveils herself as an “avenging angel” (sans wings) to the criminal underworld.
She is unrelenting and unforgiving, making sure to “double-tap” (like “John Wick”) each of the bad guys she happens to wound.
Just for good measure.
Missing from the narrative is the five-year period when North is in self-exile, living every waking (and no doubt sleeping) moment reliving the murder of her nuclear family, with numerous later ghostly visits from the 10-year-old deceased daughter Carly (Cailey Fleming).
Immediately coming to mind is the physical transformation of Linda Hamilton in 1991”s “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” who morphs from a mousy waitress into a female “She Hulk.”
That same makeover from milquetoast wussy to gamma-ray powered “mamma muncher” happens to North who, prior to the attack, is a conservative bank manager who steals $50,000 from that same financial institution after her family is murdered and then disappears only to re-surface those many years later in Skid Row in Downtown Los Angeles, living among the downtrodden, forgotten and homeless of Southern California.
Her mini-van is stocked with more assault weapons than a gun shop as she packs up and heads out to wound … sorry … “head shot” her way through the Southern California Southland.
And it’s only her own mental errors that cause any harm when she goes on-on-one against the Mexican Mafia and is stabbed during her encounter with Diego Garcia (Juan Pablo Raba), a mob boss with a particularly nasty temperament.
With the exception of Garcia, all of North’s victims are cartoon characters … completely inept and just as impotent when they grunt out oaths against her from their potty mouths.
You just know it’s going to take just a few moments before our heroine shows up to put them all six feet under.
Also stereotyped is the Los Angeles Police Department with Detective Stan Carmichael (John Gallagher Jr.) and his partner Detective Moises Beltran (John Ortiz) hot on her trail.
The only exception of the cookie-cutter presentations of LAPD’s finest is Annie Ilonzeh as FBI Agent Lisa Inman but even that is cut short when she is double tapped from an unexpected villain near the film’s climax.
All in all, “Peppermint” is a standardized and completely forgettable crime drama, except when Jennifer Garner is on the screen.
“Peppermint” slows way down from light speed to “please don’t hurt my kitty” during its short 101-minute film run when she is not on a shooting rampage.
What is extremely weird are the several appearances of the ghostly Carly but not of North’s 40-something husband Chris (Jeff Hephner) who once dispatched to the spirit world by the Mexican mobsters, makes nary another afterworld appearance.
Needless to say, “Peppermint” ends exactly where the each of the “John Wick” films have, with the movie audience begging for more.
If more includes Jennifer Garner cutting loose in “Peppermint 2,” then count on my pesos to be deposited at the nearest box office.
Questions, comments or travel suggestions, write me at theruffolos@readingruffolos.com.