I’ve written so much recently about movies that were of varying degrees of awfulness. Whether they were innocuously mediocre or abhorrently painful, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about movies I thoroughly didn’t enjoy. And I don’t really have any problem with that. I like writing about movies, and a lot of my colleagues at the Film Enthusiasts’ Club will tell you that I have a proclivity for seeking out the worst of the worst. A good film critic has to know what’s bad to know what’s good, so I like to take a dive in the deep end of the shit pool sometimes. But it's starting to make me apathetic.

So I’m going to do something a little different with this one, if you readers don’t mind. I’ll give you the general plot synopsis I usually give, but then I’m just going to start listing things about the movie I did or didn’t like. If you don’t want to sit through the rest of this, the long and short of it is that The House with a Clock in its Walls is a tonally inconsistent, immaturely unfunny mess of a film. But I think it’ll be fun to just talk shop about some of the reasons why in a way that doesn’t have me slinging around the usual banalities like “boring characters” or “predictable plot”. Sound good?

The movie follows a young boy named Lewis (Owen Vaccaro), who is sent to live with his Uncle Johnathan (Jack Black) after his parents die in a car crash. Lewis comes to realize that his uncle’s eccentricities are far more than they seem, when he finds out Johnathan is a warlock and the house where he lives is full of magic. The house, once owned by Johnathan’s partner, contains a clock which could spell doom for the world. Thus, Lewis, Johnathan and their witch neighbor Mrs. Zimmerman (Cate Blanchett) have to find it before *something something doom something* happens.

List incoming:

• The title of the movie is too long. I know this is out of the control of the filmmakers, because the movie is based on a book, but it’s a mouthful.
• I’m really getting tired of movies wherein the villain(s) believe that the only way to save the world is to kill off all, or most, of the people on it. This instantaneously throws away any sympathy I could possibly have for them, and the villain of this film isn’t nearly interesting enough to have such a dumb plan for “world peace” or whatever.
• There are three, separate “lion-shaped magic shrubbery farts yard waste on things it isn’t supposed to” jokes. Think about the best family movies. I’d hedge my bets they have an exceedingly small amount of flatulatory humor. Fart jokes are low-bar. Making them funny is hard. This movie put in no effort to make theirs anything beyond “haha isn’t a fart funny, kiddos?”
  
• There is an almost staggeringly low amount of interesting magic in this movie. All of the magic that does happen feels like things I’ve seen in Harry Potter before. No one ever uses magic in a way that I wouldn’t have expected, nor does any of the magic look very inventive. It’s magic. You can do literally anything you want. Get creative with it.
• Jack Black and Cate Blanchett have chemistry, but it is thrown to the side far too often. They are both talented and funny actors, but the film’s poor writing and janky tone issues fail them.
• Scenes start and end out of nowhere. I don’t know if this was a problem in the editing bay or the writers room, but it makes the movie feel piecemeal and sloppy. Nothing that happens has weight, even though the stakes are high, due mostly to the haphazard way in which the film is constructed.
  

I really hope I see a good movie soon. These are starting to get to me.

Grade: D+

When I first heard about Peppermint, an action movie starring Jennifer Garner, I presumed it was going to be similar to her action movies from the past. You know, something along the lines of Elektra. This was not an exciting prospect. Then, I found out the film was directed by Pierre Morel, director of the original Taken film, and was immediately convinced that this movie would be an, at best, underwhelming clone of that film. What I actually got was a mediocre John Wick clone, a movie that reminded me why John Wick works while most of its’ imitators don’t.
 
Peppermint follows the tragic revenge story of Riley (Jennifer Garner), a struggling mother whose husband and daughter are brutally gunned down by crime boss Diego Garcia (Juan Pablo Raba). Garcia believed that Riley’s husband was planning to rob him and his crime syndicate is too powerful to be dismantled by Detective Stan Carmichael (John Gallagher Jr.) and the LAPD, so the killers walk and Riley is committed to an insane asylum. On route to the mental facility, Riley escapes and trains for 5 years to become a badass assassin, intent on taking down Garcia’s entire venture.
 
As you can clearly see here, the plot similarities with John Wick are apparent. And the film is clearly trying to feed off the waves of popularity of the Keanu Reeves led series. The action is constant and intense, the main character fairly silent and stoic (though Garner’s Riley is a bit snarkier than Reeves’ Wick), and the plot paper thin. Occasionally, this approach works, allowing the film to showcase an interesting piece of action or a colorful line from the main character.
 
The problem is that Peppermint lacks the fundamental elements that made the John Wick series work: good choreography and editing. The action sequences are choppily edited and shakily shot, falling into a lot of the same pitfalls as the average PG-13 action borefest. If Jennifer Garner put in the same kind of work that Keanu Reeves did for her stunt work, it was wasted by rapid cutting and confusing camerawork. The few times something cool actually happens are severely outweighed by the surrounding blandness.
 
Without the action spectacle, the movie falls to its lackluster storytelling and character writing. This isn’t to say that these elements are particularly excellent in the John Wick series. But at least those movies have the interesting assassin underground to keep the action-less sequences relatively enthralling. Peppermint features the most barebones of revenge/police corruption stories, the kind of thing we’ve seen 1000 times. A compelling protagonist could have saved the movie, but it seemed like the filmmakers couldn’t decide on the characterization of Garner’s Riley, trying to make her both a stoic badass a la John Wick and a snarky quip machine in the vein of John McClane.
 
Peppermint is the same boring action movie I’ve come to expect at this point. There really isn’t a lot more I can say about that.
 
Grade: C