Peppermint is a Poorly Timed Christmas Movie

Peppermint (2018)

Peppermint was just like its namesake, nothing special and didn’t last long. Peppermint was one of the shortest movies of the year, at just over an hour and a half, and I don’t think I could have handled if it was longer. It wasn’t bad, but nothing came as a surprise. It was so by the numbers that I could have written a comparable script just from the trailers. It did a fine job adapting the tropes of revenge movies, but there was no nuance. The actors adequately played their one-note characters and Jennifer Garner was sufficiently badass, but the movie just went through the motions. It telegraphed just about every set piece and twist and all of the action was seen before. Or unseen. My biggest problem is that a lot of the violence was done off-screen, totally underutilizing the R-rating. I know that the imagination is supposed to be scarier than reality, but seeing a side angle of blood splatter and implied violence doesn’t really compare to when John Rambo decimated a guy with a mounted machine gun. I don’t know if it was because of budget shortfalls or cowardly directors, but it missed some opportunities for innovative violence, a la John Wick. Peppermint was satisfying enough and gets one out of two crippling stab wounds that Garner magically walks away from. (Yes, I understand that I ended on a hanging preposition, but Peppermint did not inspire me enough to correct my grammatical error. Also, hanging prepositions are not something I care about.)