One of the worst sins a movie can commit is to bore its audience.

Because you’re in the theater, you’ve paid for your ticket, and now you find yourself sitting there, bored, and you can’t even be entertained. I mean, some films are simply so bad you can’t help but laugh, and so you can at least have fun with that. But for the boring films? That’s the worst.

And so, with that said, PEPPERMINT (2018) by far is the most boring film I’ve seen this year.

PEPPERMINT is the tale of Riley North (Jennifer Garner), a woman who witnesses the shooting deaths of her husband and ten year-old daughter, and when the killers are allowed to go free, thanks to a crooked judge who is in the pocket of the powerful drug lord whose men committed the murders, she decides to take the law into her own hands and seek justice.

She does this by disappearing for several years, during which time she trains to become a killing machine, and once she returns, she’s hell-bent on killing everyone who had a hand in her family’s murders. Charles Bronson would have been proud.

PEPPERMINT opens in present day where we witness Riley kicking the living daylights out of a villain and then some. Let’s put it this way. His body ends up in the trunk of the car. The action then flashes back to five years earlier, where we see Riley happily married to Chris (Jeff Hephner) and enjoying a close relationship with her daughter Carly (Cailey Fleming).

When one of Chris’ buddies tries to persuade him to take part in a robbery, arguing that his blue-collar mechanics job is never going to get his family ahead in life, and that this will, Chris wisely turns him down. But that’s not good enough, apparently. See, his buddy tried to rob the local drug lord, Diego Garcia (Juan Pablo Raba). Garcia promptly captures and kills the buddy, and then, just because Chris “considered” stealing from him, he orders his men to kill him to make an example of him.  Jeesh!

Anyway, they shoot Chris and young Carly dead, in a scene that is surprisingly tame and not very powerful.

In spite of threats and a payoff not to testify against the men Riley identified to the police as the killers, she does in fact testify against them. But in one of the more ridiculous court scenes I’ve seen in a while, the judge lets the guys go. Obviously, the screenwriter here, Chad St. John, has never seen an episode of LAW AND ORDER. It’s an embarrassingly phony court scene.

Riley vows revenge, and then the action jumps back to present day, where Riley has returned as a vengeance machine.

PEPPERMINT is so dull that not even the scenes of vengeance are all that good.  I mean, that’s how bad things are. Why? Well, for starters, director Pierre Morel simply goes through the motions here. Morel directed the Liam Neeson movie TAKEN (2008) ten years ago but not much since.

When Riley kills a judge, when she goes after drug dealing henchmen, it’s all by the numbers and not even remotely memorable. Everything that happens in this movie has happened in a billion other action movies.

The screenplay by Chad St. John is also very weak. St. John also wrote LONDON HAS FALLEN (2016). Here, the dialogue is trite and often ridiculous, and characters robotic. Riley lost her husband and her daughter, yet I barely felt a connection to her. I felt little emotion at all through the entire movie.

Jennifer Garner of ALIAS (2001-2006) fame is okay as Riley North. She looks convincing as a fighting machine, I’ll give her that much. Although, the body count is so high in this one it’s the furthest thing from being believable. It reached Terminator proportions only without Schwarzenegger’s one-liners. As such, Garner is certainly not helped by the script, which struggles to give her either realistic dialogue or any memorable lines.

Both John Gallagher, Jr. and John Ortiz, both fine actors, are wasted here as L.A. detectives who are trying to help Riley while the rest of the authorities are out to get her because she’s a dangerous vigilante. Where have we heard that before?

Gallagher Jr. was very impressive in films like THE BELKO EXPERIMENT (2016) and 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE (2016). Not so much here, as his Detective Stan Carmichael is like the rest of the movie: a snooze.

Likewise, John Ortiz has been memorable in films like SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOOK (2012) and ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM (2007) but he too barely registers on the interest meter here. Actually, I thought he fared a bit better than Gallagher Jr. because his Detective Moises Beltran actually seemed like a real person.

In a brief role, Jeff Hephner made for a convincing loving husband, and young Cailey Fleming impressed in her brief screen time as Riley’s daughter Carly.

But Juan Pablo Raba as drug lord Diego Garcia is about as generic a villain as you can get. His dialogue could have been copied and pasted from any other fictional character of his type. The result is he’s about as scary and believable as if his name had been Carmen Sandiego Garcia.

This one offered little or no surprises. About the most surprising thing here was that I saw it in a rather crowded theater. So, there seems to be definite audience interest in this one.

That being said, audiences, especially Jennifer Garner fans, deserve far better than this.

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