Peppermint: Revenge is sweet

Peppermint (2018) • View trailer 
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. 

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.

The 33: Buried beneath clichés

The 33 (2015) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.13.15

The 2010 Copiapó mining accident, which trapped 33 men 2,300 feet underground after a catastrophic collapse within the 121-year-old copper-gold mine, is the stuff of legend: a tribute to heroism and indomitable human spirit, and a reminder that we are, indeed, capable of selflessly pulling together at times of extreme crisis.

As all of his fellow workers watch closely, Mario (Antonio Banderas, center) carefully
measures equal portions of their meager food supplies into 33 cups: the once-daily meal
that must sustain them all for as long as possible, while — they hope — rescue operations
proceed above ground.

It’s an incredible story, both in terms of what the men endured throughout their 69 days of captivity, and because of what took place on the surface, during what blossomed into an unprecedented world-wide effort to save them.

Sadly, director Patricia Riggen and her four (!) screenwriters fail to capture much of that drama in their oddly uninvolving film. Although their adaptation is based on Deep Down Dark — the best-selling account of the ordeal by Héctor Tobar, the only journalist granted access to the men and their families — this film is oddly shallow.

Despite a 127-minute running time, and some strong actors, we learn very little about most of these people; similarly, key details involving the above-ground rescue efforts are glossed over or omitted entirely.

Mostly, though, the film’s often larkish tone is simply wrong. Granted, tension can be maximized by occasional dollops of levity, but that’s a delicate balance, and Riggen makes hash of that recipe. Matters aren’t helped by an overly cheerful score from the late James Horner: a series of frivolous melodies that sound like the sort of hackneyed stuff that accompanied “south of the border sequences” in 1960s TV shows.

As the final score Horner completed before his untimely death in June, it’s an unfortunate postscript to an otherwise exemplary cinema legacy: This music too often trivializes these events.

We meet some of the primary characters during a typically jovial gathering, most of the miners and their families having bonded through their shared knowledge of this dangerous work. Mario Sepúlveda (Antonio Banderas) is the respected family man, with a doting wife and teenage daughter; Álex Vega (Mario Casas), a skilled young mechanic, chooses to work the mine because the pay is better, and thus offers greater promise to the life he wishes to build with his pregnant wife, Jessica (Cote de Pablo).

Luis “Don Lucho” Urzua (Lou Diamond Phillips), the shift supervisor, has long waged bitter arguments with mining company managers who ignore mounting evidence of the mine’s growing instability. Edison Peña (Jacob Vargas) is the token goofball and wannabe Elvis impersonator; Yonni Barrios (Oscar Nuñez) blatantly juggles a wife (Adrianna Barazza) and mistress (Elizabeth de Rasso) who live within shouting distance of each other.