When Angelina Jolie subbed in for Tom Cruise in Salt, one of the first script changes was to change the respective spouse from a damsel-in-distress to a fridged victim. It’s a strange pattern, perhaps offering an unwillingness to show a fiery action heroine doing her thing with a husband and kids waiting at home. Like Blake Lively’s (pretty good) The Rhythm Section and Zoe Saldana’s (halfway decent) Colombiana, Garner’s heroine has to lose her entire family before she can go into butt-kicking mode. Like almost every female-led actioner over the last decade, Peppermint overdoses on gloom and guilt, neglecting to let its “bad-ass female action hero” have any fun with her death-dealing ways. I’m old enough to remember when it was a shock to see Willis killed off in the opening act of Henry Cavill’s (theatrically released) The Cold Light of Day. The top-ranked movie of the moment is Ryan Phillippe’s “ Die Hard in an empty college campus” actioner The 2nd (a film technically concerning the politics of gun ownership but seemingly unwilling to espouse an opinion about it), while last week’s list made room for Hard Kill, one of Bruce Willis’ 16 (at least) VOD actioners since 2011 where the star essentially cameos in someone else’s adventure for the sake of an easy paycheck. Ironically, the film’s muddy visuals makes it look less like a glossy Hollywood flick and more like a straight-to-VOD action movie, the kind of which are currently doing quite well by Netflix.
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