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Vengeance of Mr. Peppermint evokes Korean and Hong Kong crime movies
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Matt Paprocki
If any of this sounds familiar, there’s a reason—Vengeance of Mr. Peppermint is inspired by multiple edgy and violent action films from Korea and Hong Kong. The game features broad references to the genre as a whole, though done on a single 2D plane.
It’s a clever way to simulate the cinematic fighting style. For instance, true to the films that inspired Vengeance of Mr. Peppermint, many of the goons destined to meet their demise pace aimlessly back and forth, waiting their turn, while just one or two go on the attack. Mr. Peppermint rolls, counters, throws, punches, and kicks the men who dare challenge him.
There’s a notable difference in how Hong Kong and Korean martial arts films do action compared to Hollywood. What Vengeance of Mr. Peppermint does best is emulate the stylized action of a martial arts film, the artificiality of the choreography as the antihero bounces between foes, or even grabs a light fixture and swings it into their faces. Mr. Peppermint grabs bar stools, knives, bats, and guns—anything resembling a weapon or anything that can conceivably be used as a weapon.
The wild (even surreal) dialogue exchanges also fit the style. Mr. Peppermint usually speaks only to himself or visions in his mind, questioning his actions, but struggling to overcome what he sees as a necessary act to avenge his sister. On those occasions where he slings retorts at his enemies, it’s possible to select between aggressive responses or more insightful lines regarding death and fate. I’d guess that Mr. Peppermint saw a few films before embarking on his quest for revenge. Certainly, he’s imitating a number of them.
The late ‘80s and early ‘90s were a different time in Hong Kong cinema. Gone were the turn-of-the-century settings and students avenging their masters with kung fu. The martial arts remained, but Hong Kong action films shifted focus to chain-smoking, hard-drinking detectives and cops.
In John Woo’s 1992 film Hard Boiled, Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung teamed up in what is considered one of Hong Kong’s action movie gems. Out to take down the mob, Yun-Fat and Leung shoot up the usual warehouses and streets, but the finale inside a hospital—a hospital nursery, specifically—has an astonishing sense of uncomfortable tension.
Mr. Peppermint’s constant sense of unease draws similar parallels, including an option to take a cigarette break to regain health while chatting with soon-to-be-killed foes. Violence is always near and the location doesn’t matter.
Another quintessential John Woo film, 1989’s The Killer, sees Chow Yun-Fat playing an assassin on a final job, with the intent to right a wrong. The Killer focuses on the internal strife of Yun-Fat’s character. This theme is also found in Mr. Peppermint, which finds the titular detective lost and adrift, trapped in a cycle of trauma that’s caused by his own decisions as much as others, much like a retiring assassin trying to rectify his actions.
The genre became so aggressively downtrodden, even the usual comic violence of Jackie Chan took a turn. In 1993, Chan starred in the unusually cold and grim tale Crime Story about a special agent protecting a wealthy business owner—until twists pit the story against the victim. Crime Story is Jackie Chan at his most serious. Seeing Chan lash out rather than perform stunts pairs well with the more staid Mr. Peppermint, which, while flashy-combo heavy, is less about that flashiness than the slaughter. Mr. Peppermint doesn’t even jump, standing his ground in the most literal sense.
Moving into the 2000s, fight scenes lost their choreographed beauty (in some cases entirely) and opted for hyper-violence, splattering blood, and excessive torture. Enter 2003’s Oldboy, which changed the genre forever.
If any single film served as inspiration for Vengeance of Mr. Peppermint, it’s Oldboy. Eventually remade for American audiences, the Korean original is a spectacularly brutal, cruel, even uncomfortable piece of revenge cinema. Oldboy’s protagonist Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) is released from an extended and torturous imprisonment, and sets out to punish those who held him captive.
While having different reasons for their splashy bloodshed, Mr. Peppermint and Dae-Su both impale, bash, and break people with unmerciful power to satisfy their morally cruel bloodlust. Both stories also factor in a time constraint—Mr. Peppermint must kill the perpetrator before he mentally breaks, and Dae-Su is given just five days to find his captor.
Also starring Choi Min-sik, 2012’s Nameless Gangster is a different film from Oldboy in that Min-sik plays a corrupt official who rises against the government, joins the Korean mob, and rules the city. As you might expect, he does so violently. There’s a lot of nuanced, character-driven dialog in Nameless Gangster, which Mr. Peppermint emulates during breaks in the action—usually while smoking. There’s a lot of smoking in Vengeance of Mr. Peppermint. A lot.
Society is often crumbling in this type of film. Poverty is a core element. Many take place in slums, their rotting drywall and leaking cooling systems suffocating the environments. No surprise then that the dingy apartment hallways that play host to Mr. Peppermint’s early levels all mirror this aesthetic.
Those who saw Denzel Washington in the American-made John Q will understand the basic synopsis of 2002’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Laid off from his job, Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun) becomes desperate to pay for his sister’s kidney transplant. He kidnaps a woman and plans to use ransom money to pay for the needed surgery. Unlike John Q, Ryu isn’t above maiming others to get his way in various dilapidated locales. Same with Mr. Peppermint, who swings at his foe’s knees with a baseball bat and then slams their face to mush with multiple blows as they plead for their lives.
Not to be confused with an American Burt Reynolds film from the early ‘80s, Mr. Peppermint’s connections to the 2008 Korean film Rough Cut are driven by the drama. Rough Cut concerns a gangster looking to be an actor and an actor seeking to become a gangster, creating an odd (even surreal) rivalry. Doubts on both sides lead to a final confrontation that is, of course, explicitly violent. A similar moral crisis is evident in Mr. Peppermint’s dialogue, as he questions his own motives and actions. The visions in his mind come to life, trying to guide him toward a less brutal existence. He refuses.
Censored by Hong Kong’s rating’s board, 2010’s I Saw the Devil tells the story of a cab driver who murders the wife of a highly-trained special agent, Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee Byung-hun). Soo-hyeon, upon finding the perpetrator, relentlessly beats the man, then lets him go, only to continue the hunt.
I Saw the Devil isn’t shy about gruesome torture and neither is Mr. Peppermint. His foes die ghastly deaths, oftentimes even begging for mercy. Mr. Peppermint simply isn’t capable of letting up in his enraged state—in fact, he’s granted even greater strength, filling a meter indicating his fury and then letting loose with a spectacular show of violence.
If Mr. Peppermint sticking low-level goons on meathooks seems particularly gruesome, check out 2010’s Man from Nowhere. The film’s hellish depiction of society features an abundance of melodramatic dialog and arteries spraying blood skyward as a retired special forces agent takes down a bevy of drug (and organ) dealing gangsters in an attempt to save a child. The dialogue’s heart and emotion capture Mr. Peppermint’s own internal clash—though Mr. Peppermint is far more lost than Man from Nowhere’s star Won Bin.
Finally, there’s a way to get a taste of the genre (and its influence on Vengeance of Mr. Peppermint) if subtitles or dubbing are a turn-off. A must for this feature, Kill Bill was influenced by Asian action cinema, both new and old. Uma Thurman’s starring role as The Bride brought Hong Kong’s specialty violence Stateside via director Quentin Tarantino.
No doubt, Mr. Peppermint’s various weapon-focused rampages invoke the wildest parts of Kill Bill, and both characters seek revenge over the loss of a loved one. The choreographed, blood-splattering brawls are called upon in Vengeance of Mr. Peppermint to establish flow and tactile sensation as blade slices flesh—and a boss fight against a masked swordsman is more than a slight nod to Tarantino's classic.
You can find Vengeance of Mr. Peppermint on the Epic Games Store.