Killing or dying is the basic Spanish title of Peppermint, a film that features Jennifer Garner in the role of Riley North, mother and wife who loses her family to the gangster Diego García (Juan Pablo Raba). Five years after the terrible event, and after preparing tirelessly, he will look for the murderers of her husband and her young daughter to take revenge.

Although the explanatory complement to the title of this note is a bit exaggerated, it emphasizes how little tolerable this film was, being unlikely and annoying, going through the stupid of some sequences.

The director is none other than Pierre Morel, author of the sober Taken (2008) with Liam Neeson, and that gave rise to other films of the genre I am-a-tough-and-I-break-the-head-to- who-want like John Wick (2014) or The Equalizer (2014). Here, he basically makes a film of action and revenge by changing the man for a woman, perhaps trying to get on a wave of female empowerment from which he falls without even getting on the surfboard. There is no notable characteristic of Garner's character that differentiates her from a man beyond the fact of being a woman, which makes her a poorly delineated puppet, doing everything that a man would do but, of course, being a woman. Characterizing action heroines as supermachos makes them ephemeral. Even towards the end, Garner dares a line of dialogue so ridiculous that it fills us with the embarrassment of others: "you hit like a girl," he says to the mafia boss.

Another element to highlight are some unlikely situations in the story where, with the intention of enhancing the drama, they fall into unnecessary extremes. The most notable example is when they use a taser gun to calm North after learning that their case will not go to trial for lack of evidence. Pato Bullrich passed and said that they went a bit to hell.

Then there is the cliché of Latinos with a tattooed face that are the most damn bad bad guys on the planet, approved to be eliminated by one of the leading policemen who says: “That is the difference between us and them” (alluding to the difficulty of deal with the murder of a girl). And, to close, we could refer to the terrible execution of the action scenes and even more so the shooting sequences, where there is no tension, not even the normal one that we find in films of the genre.

In summary, Peppermint is the attempt of a different action movie that ends up being equal to anyone, and that presents weaknesses in many aspects that do not need to be highlighted because we are not going to dedicate ourselves to hitting everything that is put in front of us as well as A) Yes. It is entertaining and admirable within the genre, but unfortunately it is neither enjoyable nor tolerable.