![]() ![]() John and Morel don’t invest in character development, nobody cares about the answer. Since we only get to know two cops, Beltran and Carmichael (OK, there’s a third, played by Cliff “Method Man” Smith, but he’s introduced so late it doesn’t count), and it’s a coin flip to guess which one’s corrupt. ![]() ![]() That’s when the veteran Beltran warns the younger Carmichael that Garcia has a dirty LAPD cop on the payroll, and we’re expected to spend the bulk of the movie figuring out who it is. There is exactly one surprise element in the long, bloody slog through gangster bodies. What we get is a repetitive series of scenes of Riley unleashing herself on Garcia’s army of bullet magnets, interrupted by the occasional conversation between Carmichael and Beltran, still on the case five years later. This is the tragic flaw because that journey, as Riley hones her body and mind to become a vengeance-seeking killing machine, is way more interesting than the story we get. (I always love when screenwriters drop the word “Interpol” as a catch-all for cool international crimefighting.) In those five years, as we’re told by an exposition-dispensing FBI agent (Annie Ilonzeh), Riley was traveling the world, learning combat skills and MMA moves, and disappearing before any law enforcement agency could find her. John (who worked on “London Has Fallen”), flashes forward five years, which turns out to be the movie’s tragic flaw. Even with her testimony, the three are let loose because of a rigged legal system, a corrupt judge (Jeff Harlan) and apathetic prosecutors. She and her husband, Chris (Jeff Hephner), take Carly to the Christmas carnival for her birthday - which is where three gangsters machine-gun Chris and Carly to death, and nearly kill Riley.Īided by two LAPD detectives, Carmichael (John Gallagher Jr.) and Beltran (John Ortiz), Riley testifies against the three gangsters, hitmen for a powerful Mexican drug boss, Diego Garcia (Juan Pablo Raba). The movie then gives us the backstory, five years earlier, when Garner’s character, Riley North, was a working mom helping her 10-year-old daughter Carly (Called Fleming) sell Firefly cookies. She limps back to her lair, a van on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, where she performs self-surgery on a knife wound on her thigh with vodka, a surgical stapler and some duct tape. In the violent and depressingly obvious revenge drama “Peppermint,” Jennifer Garner takes the role usually assigned to Liam Neeson - the steely, dead-eyed human weapon - without getting to show the interesting part of how she got that way.ĭirector Pierre Morel, who put Neeson in that role in “Taken,” begins with Garner in a bloody fight in the front seats of a car, ending with her shooting some guy’s brains out. ![]()
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