Riley North’s (Jennifer Garner) retribution in Peppermint doesn’t begin with her husband and daughter being murdered by drug dealers. It begins with some other, more wealthy mom lecturing her for selling girl scout cookies in the wrong parking lot. Then Riley has to skip her own kid’s birthday party to work a closing shift at the bank (don’t banks close at 5 pm?). Only later that evening do the scary Latino dudes (one of them actually has a face tattoo that says “LOCO”)…
Hey look, another movie about a former black-bag operator whose past moral lapses catch up to him when some former colleagues attempt to have him assassinated. In The Gunman, it’s Sean Penn, and he’s enlisted Taken director Pierre Morel in what can’t help but be seen as a play for a Neeson-esque late-career reinvention as a cinematic ass-kicker. The Gunman is a deeply silly movie, the kind of thing where an ex special forces sniper decides he has to go off the grid…