Peppermint

This is a fairly rote revenge thriller, with Jennifer Garner playing the woman whose family is gunned down in front of her, whose attempts within the system to get justice lead to naught, and who finds herself gunning down vast amounts of Latino gang members. There’s some nice ludicrousness in the setup (her preparation involves disappearing for five years after robbing a bank for $55,000 – that seems an incredibly low budget to be come, basically, Batman), and a few reasonable twists and turns, but this is pretty conventional by the numbers stuff that just doesn’t have a lot of fun with what it’s doing, and doesn’t really provide any new ideas or deep insight beyond the obvious that Jennifer Garner really does deserve to be in more action movies, although probably better ones than this. It’s difficult to argue with the rote racism or vengeance prone politics because the film doesn’t particularly seem to have very much invested in its ideas or in its execution - it’s just going through the motions.