Peppermint is another take on the familiar theme of vengeance. There are movies that tell a similar story better than Peppermint does, but there are so many that do it much worse. You could make an entire genre of only revenge movies. Peppermint is somewhere in the middle of all of those. Jennifer Garner is very believable in her “bad-ass” role. This is a much darker version of her Sydney Bristow character in the TV show Alias. It is a good role for her, and she should do more movies like this.  Although next time she should find a better director.

The major issues in Peppermint all stem from director Pierre Morel. You could blame a subpar  script, but I believe the choices Morel makes in the storytelling is the real problem with this movie.  There are weak performances throughout (including a really bad scene from Garner) that seem like they were done in one take and Morel just said, “That’s good enough, let’s just get to the gunfights.”  The choppy editing and Morel’s refusal to adhere to movie logic take a movie with real potential to the abyss of middle of the pack.