Three stars. Rated R, for strong violence and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.7.18
I miss the pink hair.
I also miss the moral uncertainty with which Jennifer Garner grappled so persuasively, during five seasons of television’s engaging Alias.
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| Judge Stevens (Jeff Harlan, left) isn't the slightest bit happy to see Riley North (Jennifer Garner) again ... particularly since he's bound and gagged, and she's about to do something terrible. |
And the gentler moments that bookended that show’s explosions of violence.
Although it’s a kick to see Garner get her bad self back on, don’t expect gentler moments here; there’s nothing vicarious about Chad St. John’s grim script for Peppermint. This is a revenge saga — simple and unadorned — and we must be grateful for the personality Garner is allowed to breathe into her character.
She has entered formulaic territory explored by all manner of previous actors: from Charles Bronson and Sylvester Stallone, to Liam Neeson and Keanu Reeves. Director Pierre Morel certainly knows the territory, having introduced Neeson to his own bad-ass career revival, with 2008’s Taken.
Morel moves things along at a good clip, succumbing only occasionally to obnoxious jiggly cinematography and a few other distracting stylistic tics. And if he and St. John turn Garner into an essentially indestructible avatar just this side of a superhero, well, she still takes a lot of punishment. Which she endures with persuasive agony and anguish, as she always did in Alias.
Morel and St. John hit the ground running, with a vicious confrontation between Riley North (Garner) and a gang-banger, within the tight confines of an enclosed vehicle. The outcome is inevitable, but the next step is temporarily left undisclosed; first we flash back five years, to witness what brought a suburban working mother to this dire situation.
We thus meet Riley for the second time: happily married to husband Chris (Jeff Hephner), and both devoted to young daughter Carly (the adorable Cailey Fleming). They live in a cheerful Los Angeles suburb, and money is tight; she works at a bank, he runs an auto repair shop, and they still can’t quite make ends meet.
A friend tempts Chris into a “sure-fire easy way” to make a bunch of money, but — thinking it over, later — he wisely declines. (Good man, we think: the first of several clever little touches in St. John’s script.)
Unfortunately, the “friend” intended to steal from a local drug cartel run by Diego Garcia (Juan Pablo Raba). Unaware that Chris has turned down the offer, Garcia orders his men to “smoke” everybody, as an object lesson. Cue a fusillade of gunfire that unintentionally leaves Riley alive, with horrific images now permanently etched onto her eyeballs.
She then does everything right, assuming The System will do its job: She accurately identifies the shooters during a police lineup, and duly embraces a courtroom confrontation that quickly turns ludicrous.
OK, so we’ve been warned that this is the most corrupt district in the entire city, and that Garcia has his tentacles everywhere, but it’s still ridiculous. Where are the print and TV reporters who would have followed such a high-profile case, and who immediately would have exposed such a blatant miscarriage of justice?
For that matter, wouldn’t Garcia simply have had Riley executed, long before she ever set foot inside the courtroom? (Suddenly, St. John’s script is looking rather sloppy.)
Ah, but then we wouldn’t have a movie. So, fine; we move forward. Five years pass, during which Riley goes off-grid. Exactly what she does during that interval never is fully disclosed, but she must’ve used the time wisely; she miraculously returns to L.A. with the weapons, demolitions savvy and close-quarter combat skills of a hardened Navy SEAL.
That’s a pretty big pill to swallow. (I kept expecting to learn that she’d actually been a rigorously trained CIA agent before marrying Chris and starting a family under a new civilian identity. But no.) So, swallow it we do, because — all together now, class — otherwise we wouldn’t have a movie.
In fairness, that’s it for the suspensions of disbelief … except for Riley’s success as a ruthlessly efficient, stone-cold killer, of course, but that’s to be expected from this genre. All subsequent encounters are set up and executed with efficient and engaging panache by Morel and editor Frédéric Thoraval, as Riley methodically works her way up the bad guy food chain.
And yes, there’s a degree of grim satisfaction to be experienced at times, notably when Riley confronts the bent judge (Jeff Harlan) who presided over her kangaroo court experience. Garner handles all these scenes with more emotional complexity than we ever got from Bronson or Reeves; we recognize that this “work” brings Riley no pleasure, but that it’s a task she has embraced because, well, scumbags need to be exterminated. And nobody else is doing it. (Classic vigilante justification.)
The “nobodies” include LAPD detectives Stan Carmichael (John Gallagher Jr.) and Moises Beltran (John Ortiz), who caught the initial case five years earlier. Carmichael, younger and idealistic, did what he could to help Riley at the time; he’s re-introduced with that idealism bent, if not shattered. Beltran, older and hardened, worries that his partner took that case much too seriously.
But scratch the past tense. Thanks to tantalizing background details supplied by visiting FBI Agent Lisa Inman (Annie Ilonzeh), Carmichael and Beltran are forced to consider the impossible: Riley North, back after all these years? An average working mom, responsible for all this? Seriously?
Gallagher and Ortiz play their parts well; they make a good cop team. But production continuity gets amusingly sloppy here: The present-day Carmichael is introduced as a disheveled, alcoholic mess, barely able to function. It’s amazing how dapper and focused he becomes, in all scenes after he meets Inman. It’s one of the most impressive instantaneous makeovers I’ve ever witnessed.
Such niggling details aside, Morel, St. John and Garner get the job done. Their film is considerably more entertaining than Charlize Theron’s similar rage-machine turn in last summer’s over-hyped and overblown Atomic Blonde.
Garner was the captivating glue that held Alias together. It’s nice to see her get back to basics.
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