The one novel element of Peppermint is that North's gruesome assassinations of cartel members (and at least one law enforcement official) turn her into a Twitter folk hero after several TV news programs obliterate any standard of journalistic caution by naming North as their deliverer. There's some expository dialogue wherein an FBI agent (Annie Ilonzeh) explains that North spent the years after her family's death in Bruce Wayneian fashion, traveling the world under various aliases while honing her body into a weapon, yadda yadda yadda.
We see Riley and her husband struggling with bills (she works at a bank, he's a mechanic) and to buck up their 10-year-old when a rich girl at school intercepts all the friends who were supposed to attend her birthday party. In the looping narrative style of John Wick and many others, the next hour-plus is a long flashback that will eventually return us to this wound-dressing scene. After one of those crooked, whaddayacallem, judges orders the three Latino suspects released and Riley remanded to a psych ward, she cold-cocks a cop and vanishes for half a decade. But her character, Riley North, has already acquired a Neesonian/Denzeltonian burden of grief, having witnessed, like so many heavily armed vigilantes before her, her spouse and child rubbed out before her eyes. Jennifer Garner, the star of Morel's new whitesploitation flick Peppermint, is about a decade younger than Neeson was in Taken, which in Hollywood's sexist casting calculus means she's a few years older. With Taken, French cinematographer-turned-director Pierre Morel rejuvenated the formula, stretching a single, highly quotable telephone speech ("If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills.") into a $900 million film and TV franchise while granting a then-50-something Liam Neeson a new lease on, well, death. There's an old Klingon proverb that says revenge is a dish best served in under 95 minutes, by a fondly regarded actor who's been out of the limelight for a while. "You can't see me I'm not here!": Jennifer Garner and a leather jacket co-star in the revenge thriller Peppermint.
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