'Peppermint' A Review

Peppermint is an action/revenge movie about a mother Riley(Jennifer Garner) whose husband and daughter are gunned down by a gang at a Christmas fair. She identifies the three gunman but they are eventually acquitted because of a long chain of corrupt officials. She spends five years turning herself into a killing machine and then returns on the anniversary of her family's death to settle the score.

There's almost nothing particularly interesting about any of the performances however I will say that it is refreshing to see Garner as the ass-kicking lead in this particular type of vigilante flick, a genre almost exclusively dominated by white men.

The plot is derivative, but since Death Wish these types of movies continue to be recycled and remade. There is satisfaction in the vigilante story. However Peppermint suffers from some significant racial problems in its portrayal of the Latinx cartel. All the members have face tattoos, they are all universally bloodthirsty and remorseless as well as lacking intelligence. In this respect the script feels not only 30 years dated but shatteringly tone-deaf. There is also a persistent and avoidable white-savior streak, Riley's base of operations is in skid-row and she is repeatedly referred to as an angle. There was a time this type of movie would have been enjoyed and then ignored but in our current climate the implicit messages of the movie and the stereotypes it utilizes underscore, and bolster up, the very worst kind of racism and fearmongering we can see everyday on Fox News and in the government. Artists have a responsibility with the content they create and it seems no one on this picture stopped to think what the images they were putting together would look like. Whether by intent or some kind of entitled ignorance who knows.

A seemingly inadvertent(but who knows) piece of propaganda for the Trump regime.

Don't See It.