"PEPPERMINT"..........SCRAPING THE BOTTOM OF THE POPCORN TUB.......

Peppermint (2018)     Having spent any number of posts bashing the obtuse, unwatchable efforts of film festival "artistes"........time to aim the missiles at the other end of the cinema spectrum.....

                   By that we mean the professional, bottom-feeding popcorn panderers.......no talent slugs who slap together aimless, brainless pulp to score some quick weekend cash off the multiplex suckers......

                    These guys don't actually make real films.........they stitch together pieces of whatever random genres they think will make marketable TV ads.........then throw their misbegotten, vomitous  collection of tropes on to the theater screens, like throwing spaghetti on the wall to see if any of it sticks........

                     This is how we come to have a Frankenstein-assembled nothing of a movie like "Peppermint".......a mutated mass of steaming manure strip-mined from "Death Wish", "Taken" and the last 30 action movies anyone's ever seen.........

                     Its primary selling point:   Putting Jennifer Garner back in 'Alias' mode......punching,kicking and shooting people again......only now with plenty of R-rated splatter.

                    That sound you hear.......the entire movie going populace sighing...."who the hell cares?"

                     Avenging the drive-by killings of her husband and young daughter, Garner enthusiastically slaughters her way through the villains responsible.........a horde of beefy, tattooed Latino drug dealers........(this gang is designed to represent how Trump views all south-of-the-border immigrants asking for asylum....)

                     Bang bang.....kick kick.....punch punch......shoot shoot......stab stab........and a one-two-three....one-two-three....one-two-three.......(pardon us while we swallow an aspirin and yawn.....)

                    There's not a single frame of this trainwreck that wasn't cribbed, borrowed or outright stolen from other equally rotten movies.......but supposedly cinematic diarrhea like this still goes over big in China........probably the one and only reason for the film's existence.......

                     The overwhelming tragedy here........the disappearance of  the middleground filmmakers capable of engaging a mass audience with solid storytelling skills and great, compelling stories to tell.

                     What we're left with now is a choice between two extremes..........the dreary, pompous bilge of something like 'Galveston' (see yesterday's post)............and the butter popcorn muck of endless comic book movies and even lower-level gunk like 'Peppermint'.........

                    A sad, sad state of affairs........as for 'Peppermint', it earns a well deserved AFH from us......an undiluted and pure ABOMINATION FROM HELL.........waste not one second of time on this trash......the people who made it certainly didn't.....