![]() What’s more, to carry out her plan for vengeance, she lives undercover in the guise of a homeless person on the city’s Skid Row-where she’s treated like its guardian angel, and celebrated as such in a mural, because she has single-handedly made it a safe neighborhood. She endures grievous wounds, and, because she is living off the grid and unable to risk exposure in the medical system, she treats them herself, with a staple gun and duct tape. Five years later, she resurfaces as a lone killing machine whose targets are the entire drug network and the officials who are in its grip.įrom the start, Riley’s bloody acts of vengeance have a self-sacrificial cast. A cabal of corrupt officials-including a police officer, a district attorney, a defense attorney, and a judge-helps to free the suspects. Riley survives the attack she identifies the killers in a lineup, but to no avail. Afterward, while the North family is on a holiday-season outing, gang members murder Chris and Carly. A friend lures Chris into a scheme to rob drug dealers Chris backs out, but he’s nonetheless implicated. ![]() They live in a modest house she and their daughter, Carly (Cailey Fleming), endure the contempt of the school’s rich kids and their parents (one in particular, played by Pell James, is especially cruel). Jennifer Garner plays Riley North, an employee in a Los Angeles bank whose husband, Chris (Jeff Hephner), runs an auto-repair shop. Its subject is a long-familiar bugbear of respectability and decency, the drug trade, which it looks at with a despicably ignorant and contemptuous perspective. It’s a new version of an old genre, the vigilante tale, but with a special whiff of prejudice, hatred, and resentment that-for all the film’s absurd artifice-blend all too readily into the distorted mental landscape of current American life. John), which opens today, leaves a trace of slime that’s hard to wipe up-and leaves the feeling that it would be better for the world at large if this movie hadn’t been made. The false dichotomy of fascistoid vigilantes on the one hand and saccharine fantasy on the other is just disingenuous.Mediocre movies often appear and then disappear, as though they’d never been, but “Peppermint” (directed by Pierre Morel and written by Chad St. What I said was that stories about reforming the system, i.e, replacing the corrupt politicians and other authorities through legal means, usually end with the new boss being the same as the old boss. It problematizes the issue and has a discussion about it - not a particularly deep or wide-ranging discussion, but at least it's something.Īre there still elements of the same issue in those shows? Yes, but that's not their core message.Īnd I didn't say there were no stories about "good guys doing it the right way". That's a pretty significant difference.ĭaredevil is conflicted about what he does, and his friends even more so. Luke Cage is different in that he's unwillingly dragged into the conflicts he's involved in rather than seeking out criminals to kill. Well, this and the fact that it combines overblown reverence for soldiers with a ridiculously one-sided pro-gun message and having the only representative of civilian authority be a spineless, cowardly, opportunistic, lying hypocrite. Even something like Leverage, which is ostensibly played for laughs, is based on plenty of dark, dark, reality that John Rogers has actually talked about here on RPGnet.Įdit: and there are stories about the good guys doing it the right way, plenty of them.Ĭlick to expand.I strongly disliked Punisher for exactly this reason. The alternative is something like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which - terrible accents aside - is a family-friendly morality tale that bears no resemblance to real fights against injustice. They are either corrupt, intimidated, or next on the list, possibly all three). ![]() (The remaining law enforcement officials are going to be looked at suspiciously, at best. When journalists, lawyers, politicians, and cops are being killed all the time, there isn't much left for the usual democratic process. Neither is DareDevil.Īnd without dragging the thread into too many dark places, this isn't totally invented - there's a reason north Mexico (and the associated gangs) is utilized as a setting. But as long as we put a Marvel logo on it it's fine? I mean Luke Cage is immune to bullets, but the story otherwise isn't different.
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