3 Short Paragraphs: Peppermint

2018, Pierre Morel (Taken) -- download

A female led revenge flick by the director of Taken; sounds like the perfect candidate for one of the topics we considered for the re-engineering of this blog into a podcast, a boozy podcast. But I admit, I was rather boozy when I committed to this (re)direction, so I am not sure I am so taken with it now... pun intended. BUT, the topic -- the female empowerment movie in the post female-empowerment era was a fun idea. What? WTF did I mean by post female-empowerment? I mean, in the era when old white men are getting to define what female-empowerment is; back in those days it just meant angry women with a gun, which is basically what this movie is. We hope we are moving into an era where women can get to define what the term means and whether a movie is of it. I doubt we are.

Anywayz, Jennifer Garner is a woman whose family is gunned down in front of her, daughter included. Gunning down the husband is always fine, but once you kill kids, all the cards are off the table. I am not sure what that term means, but they always use it. Not only does she identify and testify but everyone believes her, and knows she is correct -- open and shut case. But dirty judges (and cops and...) get the case tossed out by throwing her anti-psychotic medication in her face. And when it happens, she does go psychotic and is dragged away literally kicking & screaming. Who wouldn't. But she escapes her captors (the state) and disappears.

Years later, lithe Jennifer Garner has returned from overseas where she learned to fight & kill. She begins killing off the members of the cartel who slew her family, while hiding out in an abandoned car on Skid Row. Yeah the famous one, which turns out is not just a term coined by Hollywood but a real place in LA. Things escalate until she confronts the cartel leader and gets to kill him. Yes, the movie is that boring, with only the barest hints of what it probably wanted to be.