Peppermint
            
Director: Pierre Morel
Year: 2018
Rating: 7.0
Guilty pleasures come in all shapes and sizes. Girls with guns is mine. Jennifer Garner as a female bent on vengeance who takes a licking and keeps on killing. And killing. And killing. My kind of female revenge film with a high body count. I think they are still counting them. If she teamed up with The Equalizer and John Wick, they could take over a small country. Nice seeing Jennifer Garner back in action. Nothing particularly new here nor very stylish nor very imaginative but it never slows down to catch its breath once it is set in motion. The kills are brutal, up close and personal. This genre of revenge film has become so pervasive that it feels like they are littering the airwaves - but I find it strange when I see reviews calling this film unrealistic, but the Wick films aren't. This was clobbered by the professional critics who have their own form of a body count. This was directed by Pierre Morel who helmed the first Taken film - and this basically follows in its footsteps. No mercy, no hesitation. They are evil. You kill them. Admittedly, perhaps they could have taken more time between action set-pieces - let us get to know her better - give her some clever lines to say as she kills but she is all business.

 

The audience gets about five seconds before the first kill - in a car in a parking lot - don't you remember me? Then the quick backstory - she was married with an adorable little girl and husband who are both murdered by drug dealers. They get off being sentenced due to corruption. She disappears for five years and comes back fully trained in the art of killing. Any of us could do it. We just have to take five years off. Probably too late for me. I don't know where she went but it wasn't Disneyland. She comes back to L.A. and for a few months gets the lay of the land and the gangsters who killed her little girl - the dead husband doesn't seem to bother her as much. And then one nice autumn day, decides to kill everyone. Not just the ones who fired the shots. Everyone. Sadly, there was no sequel as it didn't do well at the box office because there was still a cartel for her to kill and who doesn't enjoy seeing a cartel get wiped out.