Mark Reviews Movies: KATE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 9, 2021

Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) kills and does so well. There's more to the eponymous protagonist of Kate, who's a professional assassin, trained since childhood to fight and shoot, but little of that matters to this story. Her time is running out, and vengeance must be taken for that fact.

Here, one supposes, we take what little more than the fighting, stabbing, and shooting this movie offers. There is, for example, Winstead's performance, which possesses a touch of defeat whenever the character pauses from all of the fighting and killing the plot provides her. Kate is dying. That's the central gimmick of the story, and with any chance of the dream of some normal life gone, Kate is left with and to do the only things she has known for most of her life.

In those brief moments between the action of Cedric Nicolas-Troyan's movie, Winstead imbues them with regret and resentment. It had to be this way for Kate, given her upbringing as an orphan under the tutelage and supervision of a man within some organization of professional killers. It didn't have to be this way for her entire life, though, or at least, that's what Kate thought—until someone poisons her with an especially strong radioactive isotope.

The entirety of this plot, generated by screenwriter Umair Aleem, is pretty routine. Kate discovers her death sentence and spends the remainder of the story tracking down the person or people responsible for poisoning her. It's a pretty lengthy search, since so many people, up the chain of a local criminal organization in Tokyo and Osaka, are involved and an entirely different, unrelated scheme within the gang is unfolding at the same time.

Of course, none of that really matters, either, because the real point of this movie is put Kate up against a series of opponents in a variety of locales. Nicolas-Troyan certainly has an eye for those backdrops and a mindset of making the action fast, varied, and gruesomely brutal. By the time the story arrives at its all-out bloodbath of a climax, though, we've already seen everything this movie has to offer again and again, while the human element of it seems mostly like a matter of anatomy—how blades can ravage a body (and, in one particularly graphic moment, a face), what damage bullets do to a head, how a head can slide off a neck and to the floor.

Six months before the central plot, Kate and her longtime mentor/handler Varrick (Woody Harrelson) arrange the assassination of a yakuza lieutenant, leaving the man's pre-teen daughter alone with her father's corpse. After breaking the only rule she has of leaving kids out of this bloody business, Kate is thinking of retiring and having a go at a normal life—a family, a house with a white picket fence, etc.

The next job—to kill yet another yakuza honcho—is to be her last. She celebrates the decision by taking a flirtatious guy from the hotel bar up to her room, but this turns out to be an error.

During the next mission, she begins to feel woozy and ill, and a trip to the hospital reveals that Kate has severe radiation poisoning. She'll be dead within 24 hours. All the clues point to the local yakuza, so Kate, keeping herself going with injections of stimulants, eventually abducts Ani (Miku Martineau), the orphaned and rebellious daughter of that first target, in order to find the man or men responsible for her imminent death.

Action is the main game here, as Kate questions and threatens those who might know how to find Kijima (Jun Kunimura), the mysterious and reclusive yakuza boss. One sequence, set in the private rooms of a fancy restaurant, is noteworthy, not only for the choreography (which has Kate getting up-close and personal with a couple waves of henchmen, using a misfired pistol as a baton), but also for the relative absence of color to the setting—lots of white, black, and gray, as splattering blood punctuates the neutral palette.

In addition to the few moments of quiet sorrow that she brings to the character, Winstead is also physically convincing in these sequences, fighting with quick efficiency and an underlying sense of physical exhaustion. It adds at least some tension to the later sequences, which become visually muddier (one chase/shootout in a series of dark alleys, with the occasional splash of neon lighting, and the climax, within the halls and rooms of a sterile high rise) and muddied (Faster editing overtakes the choreography) as things progress.

It all becomes repetitive and hollow, both from an action and a plot perspective, as a trail of clues, with a few predictable twists near the end, leads to more fisticuffs, blade-wielding, and gunplay. We eventually learn some of Kate's back story and how it mirrors Ani's recent experience, leading to an intriguingly tenuous but superficial bond between the assassin, who wants a family, and the girl, who doesn't know her new idol is responsible for the loss of her own family.

Kate does have flashes of style and a fully-invested central performance. It's mostly, though, a generic and shallow collection of decreasingly effective sequences of action and violence.

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