Peppermint (4 Stars)

Today I went with a few other members of the Stuttgart Film Group to see "Unfriended: Dark Web", a film I've been anticipating for a long time. When I arrived at the cinema (EM in Stuttgart) I found that the film wasn't being shown today. My first reaction was to blame myself for reading the film schedule wrong, but I asked a member of staff about it. He told me that the film had been cancelled at short notice, about two hours earlier. Another film, "Anderswo: Allein in Afrika", had sold out, so an extra showing had been scheduled which replaced "Dark Web". If I'd been by myself I would have walked out and gone back home, but I had two other group members with me, so we looked for an alternative film. I rejected "Allein in Afrika", a documentary about a solo bicycle trip through Africa, out of principle. "Peppermint" seemed like a reasonable choice.

Riley North is a happily married woman with a young daughter. Her husband is asked by a friend to help him rob Diego Garcia, a Los Angeles drug lord. He refuses to do it, but the drug lord finds out about his possible involvement and sends men to kill him in a drive-by shooting, in which the daughter is also killed. Riley sees the killers clearly and takes them to court, but the case is thrown out. After she attacks the men in court the judge orders that she should be sent to a psychiatric ward, but she escapes.

For five years nothing is heard of her. Then she returns to Los Angeles as a different woman. She's armed with military weapons, and she's a skilled fighter. She attacks and kills the three men who murdered her husband and daughter. She kills the judge, whom she correctly suspects of having been bribed. She kills the state prosecutor and her defence attorney. But it doesn't stop there. It will take a lot more than that to still her thirst for revenge.

I went into the film without high expectations. Jennifer Garner isn't one of my favourite actresses, as I'm sure I've said before. I was pleasantly surprised. It's a hard-hitting action thriller, in which Jennifer Garner proves she can do everything Liam Neeson can do and she can do it better. I like tough women, and she's certainly tough. The film has been criticised for being predictable and having no plot twists, but in my opinion plot twists are overrated. Plot twists have become so fashionable that audiences sit in the cinema expecting something unexpected to happen. That's ridiculous. A good story can move from A to B without taking a detour via C, D and E. I enjoyed "Peppermint". Now I just have to arrange another date to see "Dark Web".