The most important part of an action movie is, of course, the action, so I'll be mainly discussing the action. Garner clearly trained for this role. She has the physicality to be believable enough as a competent vigilante. And she handles herself well enough with guns and in fight scenes. Garner herself was good, but there's just something lacking in the way the action scenes were choreographed, like they lacked style or spark, so that Peppermint's action scenes are, at best, only average in quality overall, not outstanding, which is a shame because the ingredients for a spectacular action movie like John Wick are here, but this movie just didn't quite achieve it. I'd rank Peppermint's action below the superb quality of great recent action movies like John Wick or Atomic Blonde. That's not to say the action was all bad though. An example of bad action in a recent movie I saw would be Mile 22, where the camera shakes so much and the editing is so choppy that we can barely see anything. Thankfully, Peppermint doesn't resort to that style of choppy shaky-cam action, so at least Peppermint can be praised for holding the camera relatively steady during its action. The highlight of Peppermint's action, I'd say, would be a scene where Jennifer Garner infiltrates the bad guys' heavily guarded base by creatively using an SUV for cover. That scene was pretty good.
And I watched this whole movie and never learned what the title means. What does "Peppermint" have to do with anything in this movie?
And I watched this whole movie and never learned what the title means. What does "Peppermint" have to do with anything in this movie?