I know it's been hard to capture the spirit of the holiday season this year, what with all of the restrictions to product availability, travel, methods of shopping, social gatherings, and the like. But hopefully everyone still had the best Christmas they possibly could.
Sometimes, you just have to heat some frozen leftovers, ship yourselves some gourmet candy, bake an easy dessert you found on YouTube, and find a movie for you and immediately yours to pass the time with. For me, it was Chinese food, Swiss Colony, homemade cheesecake, and--appropriately enough--
Peppermint.
In the last issue of
Anime Spotlight, I mentioned the Jodie Foster vigilante film,
The Brave One. And to make a long review short, if you've seen movies like
The Brave One,
Death Sentence with Kevin Bacon, the original
Death Wish films,
The Punisher with Thomas Jane (who has
terrible luck with his fictional families, BTW...), Denzel Washington in
The Equalizer series, the
John Wick trilogy with Keanu Reeves, or
Taken with Liam Neeson, you've seen
Peppermint done several times already with varying degrees of much better quality and success.
After her would-be drug-kingpin-robbing husband and their daughter are gunned down by three thugs who get off scott-free despite having very unique facial tattoos that Stevie Wonder could see from space, a timid housewife (played by Jennifer Garner) escapes from a mental institution transport and spends a time-skip offscreen becoming Sydney Bristow from
Alias so she can exact bloody revenge on the crime syndicate responsible for her family's deaths...and become a local folk hero by improbably evading the exposition police and threatening to domestically terrorize whatever random person she witnesses being shitty to their fellow man at any given moment. This all sounds appealingly predictable on paper, and the brutal fight scenes are as well-choreographed as in many of the previously mentioned, much better movies, resulting in her looking as bloody and dazed as Bruce Willis in the third act of an R-Rated
Die Hard movie. Garner even nails some of the badass one-liner deliveries she's given--just don't ask me to repeat any of them because I can't remember one. Her character's out-of-country training, if that's what it was (which might have made for an interesting movie of its own, if not an
Arrow-esque TV serial), is periodically told through throwaway exposition dumps, rather than shown as should have been the case. Speaking of cases, the identity reveal of the usual, corrupt cop character that shows up in a few of these kinds of movies doesn't make sense here, feeling like a case of last-minute script changes for the sake of not being predictable...in a movie that was tailor-made to be a predictable vigilante flick. I say that if you're going to make a predictable vigilante flick, lean hard
into the predictability and upcharge the popcorn...but maybe that's just me? In any case, Garner eventually kicks enough asses for the head ass to pull his head
from his ass and take notice of her actions. As she mows through the last few (until it's not) henchmen, Garner's character finds herself on the brink of death several times,
only to be wakened EVERY SINGLE TIME by the plot-convenient ghost of her dead daughter!? And don't get me started on the final showdown. With the druglord, the corrupt cop, and their top goons having taken a hostage to draw her out,
she hijacks the news and social media to tell unarmed civilians to come film an army of criminals with automatic weapons, is saved by the
deus ex policia, and the movie ends with her escaping police custody
by literally fucking disappearing! I get the feeling that the writers were going for a sense of "open to supernatural interpretation" cleverness, but this was the wrong movie to do it, and like everything else that they attempted in the spirit of "uniqueness" and "creativity," it clearly and immediately does not work. And that's not even touching on the elements of
Peppermint that are just blatantly stupid. So if anyone has the number for bullshit, please leave it in the comments below so I can call it and report this movie.
D+
As I am closing this out, the year is also closing in on its final hours. It's been both painfully eventful and painfully uneventful in many ways, and for once, I am looking forward to 2020 being hindsight. Let's all try to have a good year (as "better" seems like an understated and unnecessary comparative at this point) and be smart and kind to one another, that we may live to appreciate all that we still have and to regret all that we have cost ourselves.
Stay tuned and stay conscious; next year, everything will come together following a new Anime Spotlight about steampunk auto-racing and superhuman cowboys.
Revolution by resolution!
Happy New Year!
Ticketmaster,
out!
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