Cedric Nicolas-Troyan’s Kate is about as routine as action thrillers get. Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars as the eponymous assassin, who, after expressing to her boss, Varrick (Woody Harrelson), her desire to leave her violent life behind and later botching a hit, discovers that she’s been poisoned and only has a day to live. This paves the way for a vengeance-fueled Kate to put her killing-machine prowess to use one last time.
The filmmakers attempt to create a narrative that’s free of clutter as Kate tears her way through Tokyo’s underworld with the misfit niece, Ani (Miku Martineau), of a yakuza bigwig in tow. But the film’s reluctance to delineate much of Kate’s history, such as the particulars of how she fell into a criminal lifestyle, results in a frustrating vagueness. Even the organization that she works for is sketched as your run-of-the-mill shady and quietly ruthless entity, which makes the reveal that her poisoning was an inside job feel hopelessly predictable.
You may wish that Kate’s narrative possessed the same attention to detail as its elaborate, and elaborately violent, action set pieces. Even though the threats of danger to Kate feel almost beside the point due to her death being preordained, the film’s plethora of fight sequences are still intriguing for their technical sophistication. These skirmishes are never chopped up to the point where the stunt work is hidden, and—especially in an early sequence where Kate fights a horde of yakuza in a traditional Japanese restaurant—largely depend on long takes and sinuous tracking shots that capture the actors’ intricate fight choreography.
But technical wizardry can only take a film so far, and as the stylized violence becomes redundant as the film progresses, Kate’s style-over-substance sensibility takes on a particular garishness. Since the filmmakers fail to provide sufficient context about Kate’s life before she became an assassin, the action scenes are never charged with emotional tumult, and as such play out as excuses for Kate to harm or kill people in inventive ways. This, coupled with the near-gleeful zeal that Kate exudes while dispatching anyone who so much as looks at her strangely, ensures that the film is largely defined by its blatant disregard for human life.
Kate isn’t eager to explore how its main characters are cut from the same cloth, namely how they’re haunted by rejection and don’t take shit from anyone. Still, we get a brief emotional respite from the film’s rampaging spirits when Kate, regretful for having wasted her youth training to be an assassin, tries to convince Ani to simply allow herself to be a kid. Of course, by the time that Ani has successfully helped Kate to enact her revenge, that moment of sincerity is all but undermined by the filmmakers. As such, Kate not only dubiously depicts violence as cyclical, but it also sees it as a badass tradition that’s worthy of being upheld.
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