#WILL THERE BE A SECOND PEPPERMINT MOVIE MOVIE#

After the opening scene, we flash back five years to show Riley with her happy, but struggling family (Jeff Hephner as Chris, Cailey Fleming as Carly). Too bad about all the extra stuff that’s thrown haphazardly into the first act. So this Girl Scout den mother disappears for five years and comes back as an utter beast on the anniversary of her family’s death, ripping and tearing through Garcia’s seemingly endless crew of mooks in a whirlwind 24 hours. Garcia’s got cops, lawyers, and judges on his payroll, so even though Riley IDs them, the shooters still get off and Riley gets coldly written off as a crazy bitch while they laugh. Not that it wasn’t already simple: Garner’s Riley North watches her family get gunned down by a cartel after its leader, Diego Garcia (Juan Pablo Raba), gets wind that her husband was pitched on robbing him. Maybe it would’ve been better if it was simpler. It sure plays like he did, and he was deeply mistaken. It’s downright wonderful to hear her growl her plan to a bad guy when he thinks he’s got her cornered: “I’m gonna blow a hole in your fucking face, and then I’ll improvise.” Maybe Morel counted on all that to carry the film. It’s a hoot to watch her mow people down. Garner can go, and even after ten years cooling her heels and doing strong, consistent work in melodramas and family films, she’s still got the stuff. There’s a reason people stayed loyal to Alias as it got decreasingly coherent and sane, and there’s a reason why an Elektra spinoff was tried even when most people felt like Daredevil didn’t work. She’s heroic, not just in the sense of the role she occupies, but in just how appealing she is in it even as everything seems to be going wrong around her.

#WILL THERE BE A SECOND PEPPERMINT MOVIE MOVIE#

Still, when Garner’s on-screen shredding dudes like Enron documents and all I can think about is what this might look like if Coralie Fargeat or Michelle MacLaren or even Robert Rodriguez was directing, something has gone terribly wrong.īecause let’s be clear, the problem with this movie is definitely not Garner.

One of them is following The Ebert Rule, which I hold dear in theory: “Judge the movie for what it’s trying to be, not for what you want it to be.” Peppermint isn’t trying to make any profound statements on vigilantism or do anything special its thesis is “Hey, remember how cool it was to see Jennifer Garner beat the shit out of people? Let’s see some more of that!” It’s a strong thesis. Not just because he’s credible, but because his antagonists are shockingly believable, as uncomplicated and repugnant as they are.Īs a film critic, there still things I feel I can be better at.

It’s patronizing as hell-any movie about a father wrecking house to get back his daughter from sex traffickers who kidnapped her because she didn’t listen to him is bound to be at least a little patronizing-but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying to see Liam Neeson steamroll over these bastards.

Pierre Morel’s Taken is the platonic ideal of this. We tend to watch vigilante movies to see a brutally wronged person rise up and take vengeance on the people that wronged them, and in a good, basic vigilante movie-one that doesn’t care to question that nature of vigilantism-the patterns of buildup and release at work are similar to sex, right down to the small gushes and geysers of blood that punctuate the action. It’s a solid opening statement, actually.

But soon enough, a head gets slammed against the window and we cut inside to see Riley North (Jennifer Garner) struggling with some gangbanger before capping him in the head. For a single clever second, as the camera closes in, we see a silhouette that looks a lot like two people copulating. It’s bouncing, and we all know what that means…that somebody’s probably getting murked in there because this is a vigilante action film and that occasionally means playful visual puns. Peppermint opens with a crane shot in a parking lot with a lone car in it.

Will there be a second peppermint movie