When a happy wife and mother in current day Los Angeles sees her husband and 10-year-old daughter killed in a drive-by shooting, her life takes a nasty turn. It becomes an even greater tragedy when the justice system allows the murderers in the drive-by shooting to go free. Five years later this broken, fragile, widowed woman resurfaces in L.A. with a lot of weapons, a new attitude, and a new haircut to exact her revenge on the criminals who took her family.
This woman (Jennifer Garner, Love, Simon) completes her revenge through a shootout in a piñata store, a shootout in a contemporary Hollywood mansion, and then a shootout in the “skid row” neighborhood of homeless itinerants. Now I know you might be thinking this synopsis sounds monotonous. But I should also mention that in between these shootouts is another scene where the leading lady uses an exploding rope instead of an arsenal of guns. Jennifer Garner is apparently trying to revisit some of her acting roots when she starred in the TV series Alias from 2001-2006 where she played a sexy determined spy.
Peppermint felt like it was just a platform to show us the excitement of guns and Jennifer Garner’s amazingly toned, sweaty arms. Many other films have been made of this “strong-willed woman turning into a vigilante to gain her revenge” story like Kill Bill with Uma Thurman (2003 and 2004), Enough with Jennifer Lopez (2002), and The Brave One with Jodie Foster (2007). Peppermint is not one of those vigilante films that will be remembered fondly.
Let’s all hope together that Jennifer Garner’s next film will be better.
