Everyone is well within their rights to enjoy movies that don’t hold the strongest of reputations in the eyes of either critics or the general public, but attempting to elevate something as terrible as 2018’s revenge-fueled actioner Peppermint onto the same pedestal as the classics is nothing short of madness.
Sure enough, a Reddit thread boldly proclaiming that Jennifer Garner’s Riley North deserved to be spoken about in the same revered tones as Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor drew exactly the response you’d expect when a film that drew a 13 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and landed its star a nomination for Worst Actress at the Razzies is pushed into the conversation alongside the iconic female figureheads of the Alien and Terminator franchises.
It’s probably not a coincidence that the thread in question has since been deleted, with the majority of commenters nothing short of incredulous that such a boneheaded comparison could even be processed as a rational thought. That being said, a 70 percent user rating on the aforementioned aggregation site underlines that Peppermint does have its supporters, but comparing its protagonist to Ripley and Connor? Madness, utter madness.
Delivering exactly the sort of pedestrian B-tier thrills you’d expect from a $25 million genre flick helmed by the director of Taken, From Paris with Love, and The Gunman, Garner does at least give it her all in the lead. Awakening from a coma following an attack that killed her husband and daughter, Riley trains hard to become a street-level dispenser of justice, but there’s not exactly anything worthy of launching Peppermint towards all-timer status.