In director Pierre Morel’s Peppermint, an American soccer mom’s family is gunned down by vicious MS-13 gang members. After she demands justice, the Deep State thwarts her. So she disappears for a few years to learn “a very particular set of skills,” and returns to take justice into her own hands.

Garner plays an Angel Mom. Look at this publicity photo from the movie. In the movie, angel’s wings are her calling card. President Trump’s Angel Moms are mother’s who have lost their children to illegal immigrants.

At Rotten Tomatoes only 17 percent of critics awarded Peppermint a positive review, compared to 72 percent of the audience.

Gee, you think critics might be a bit out of touch? You know, like they are with Dave Chappelle?

Nevertheless, what a delight it is to come across a legitimately subversive piece of genre filmmaking.

Peppermint was released almost exactly a year ago today and died a fairly quick death at the American box office. That’s a shame. But it is available on home video, which is where I finally caught up with it over the weekend.

Reactionary critics hated it, attacked it as *yawn* racist:

Here’s one:

Jennifer Garner plays Riley North, a true underdog, the movie takes great pains to reassure us, even before her husband and young daughter are slaughtered by cartoonishly evil members of a Mexican drug cartel. But pretty much everyone opposing her is a caricature, and disturbingly, most of them are also people of color.

Here’s another:

“Peppermint” is a racist film that reflects the current strain of anti-immigrant politics and its paranoid focus on MS-13.

Yet another:

And what’s up with the bad guys being mostly tattooed Latinos without a trace of character distinction?

The idea that Peppermint is racist is, of course, absurd. Star Jennifer Garner is the only white hero. All the other good guys are either black, Hispanic, or Asian. All the other white people are villains.

What’s more, Peppermint reflects a true reality in today’s America, a reality where evil MS-13 gang members (never named in the movie), who never should have gotten into our country, prey on law-abiding Americans.

Movies frequently reflect reality, frequently ping off that reality to create wish-fulfillment, which is exactly what movies are supposed to do. And whether today’s provincial and close-minded critics want to admit it or not (and we all know they do not), this invasion of MS-13’s killers and drugs have caused enormous damage to law-abiding Americans.

Peppermint might not be art, but it does have something important and moral to say, and it does target the powerful — a powerful gang and the powerful media and government institutions that protect it.

The story is set in present-day Los Angeles, the once-beautiful City of Angels. But due to unchallenged leadership by a Democrat Party more interested in holding on to power than fixing a housing, job, and drug crisis — much of it caused by illegal immigration — Los Angeles is now a fallen angel.

Jennifer Garner’s Riley North represents a true angel to the Los Angeles’ forgotten and ignored underclass. She also represents the countless law-abiding victims of a political party dedicated to keeping the floodgates of illegal immigrants wide open as a means to replace the American people they cannot stand.

Riley works at a bank, has a young daughter, is happily married, but despite their two incomes, she and her husband cannot afford to buy a home.

Desperate for a better life, Riley’s husband almost makes a mistake, but doesn’t change his mind soon enough. As a result, he and his and daughter are murdered. Riley can identify the killers, but in an America where Hillary Clinton can smash iPhones without being prosecuted, where the Black Panthers can block polling places and not be prosecuted, where James Comey can disclose classified information and not be prosecuted, where local, unelected judges constantly thwart the will of the people and their elected officials by arbitrarily overturning gay marriage and travel bans, there will obviously be no justice for Kate Steinle Riley North.

In fact, Riley is turned into the villain. For telling the truth about members of a protected class, she becomes the accused. Obviously, the sycophant media question none of this.

Fast-forward five years and the shit’s about to get real.

Peppermint is no Citizen Kane, it is not even Taken, which was also directed by Morel. But it’s a much better than Eli Roth’s Death Wish reboot and distinguishes itself from the usual-usual vigilante movie because it has something to say about something other than the criminal justice system.

For instance, much of the movie takes place on Skid Row, a place that — in real life — is now a tent city for countless thousands, a place that directly reflects what is happening to law-abiding Americans in their own country because elected officials refuse to do anything other than encourage illegal immigration.

Why so many homeless…?

Drugs — Much of which comes across our porous border

Poverty – Illegal aliens steal jobs from law-abiding Americans.

Cost of living — Cheap illegal labor artificially depresses wages.

Housing shortage — Law abiding Americans compete with illegal aliens for housing.

Don’t get me wrong, Peppermint doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It does, though, have the moral courage to reflect a problem in our society the elite (especially film critics) do not want reflected. Better still, it is never boring, there’s a ton of action, and Garner is simply outstanding — and believable — as a one-woman killing machine taking it to the monsters who annihilated her family and the monsters among the American elite who allowed it to happen.

In today’s increasingly fascist, censorious, and woke-tard America, in a country where cultural, media, and academic elites are desperate to banish legitimate debate, ideas, and lines of thought, Peppermint is a rarity, a truly subversive piece of filmmaking.

Peppermint isn’t Republican or conservative or Trumpian. It just does what movies should do… Tells a truth the powerful do not want told.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.