When Riley North and her family are gunned down in the street, she is the only survivor. Her husband and child both die. Riley positively identifies the men responsible, but a corrupt judge throws the case out while the corrupt-or-incompetent prosecutor doers nothing to stop him. For good measure, the judge tries to throw her in psychiatric detention.
Riley escapes, vanishing for five years, despite the efforts of the FBI and Interpol to find her. Suburban soccer moms can do that, you know. International ninjas, all of them.
When Riley eventually resurfaces, she is a gun-totin', knife-fightin', criminal-punchiin' powerhouse, on a one-woman mission to take down everyone complicit in the deaths of her family and the failure to punish those who did it.
So what we have here is a vigilante revenge film of the type exemplified by Death Wish: an ordinary man or woman pushed by evil acts into a rampage of cathartic violence. And if that's the jam for your cinematic toast, then Peppermint - preposterous though Riley's five year world tour of ninja sneakiness undoubtedly is - is a pretty good option. Jennifer Garner is convincing as both the ordinary mom and the badass vigilante, and the script rocks along at a decent clip. Just don't think about it too hard, or expect any kind of nuance, really.
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