With the release of Gunpowder Milkshake earlier this year and Kate this week, it feels like Netflix is trying to get into the John Wick business. Not assassinations, of course, but action-heavy movies with style. While the former featured a cast full of great actresses like Michelle Yeoh and Angela Bassett punching bad guys and firing high-powered weaponry, Kate just has Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Luckily, she’s more than up to the task of carrying director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan’s film and the results is a fun and surprisingly thoughtful action romp.
Umair Aleem’s script begins with Kate tasked with killing a prominent yakuza family member in Osaka. The situation takes a turn, however, when her superiors insist she break protocol by carrying out the hit despite the target’s daughter, Ani (Miku Martineau), being present. Ten months later, Kate is still haunted by images of Ani covered in blood and screaming over her father’s body. So, she decides it’s time to quit and lead a normal life. First, though, she wants to finish the job and take out the same family’s leader, Kijima (Jun Kunimura). Unfortunately, the hit fails when Kate suddenly grows ill and soon discovers that not only has she had a lethal exposure to a radioactive substance, but she’ll be dead within 24 hours.
That impending death isn’t just a narrative motivator in Kate. Rather, both Nicolas-Troyan and Winstead never let the audience forget that despite being totally kickass, Kate is also human. Even before she starts punching people, she’s coughing up blood, downing pills and occasionally injecting herself with adrenaline to keep going. As the movie progresses, we can even see her skin deteriorating from the radiation poisoning and because that vulnerability is so present, it raises each fight’s stakes even higher. After being thrown through low tables and shoji walls in a restaurant fight, Kate is visibly worse for the wear. She’s sweaty, covered in cuts and gasping for air. With each encounter she survives, she also becomes more vulnerable to the next attack and in an action landscape where Vin Diesel can seemingly fly and superheroes seem nigh invincible, there’s something refreshing about following a hero who can actually get hurt.
That said, Kate’s progressive weakening doesn’t stop Winstead from taking part in some incredible fights. Except for a CGI-heavy, Tokyo Drift-esque car chase early on, Nicolas-Troyan stages these action set pieces in ways that feel grounded in reality and production designer Dominic Watkins and cinematographer Lyle Vincent do great work not only giving the audience an understanding of each location, but giving them an enjoyable visual style. Where the aforementioned restaurant is defined by stark whites and darks with splashes of blood, a scene in a marketplace where Kate has to protect Ani is defined by neon lights and deep shadows. There’s serious visual flair in watching long takes of Kate running through bars and smashing stray bottles into her assailants’ faces as she goes or wedging herself high in an alley wall to shoot down at unsuspecting bad guys, but the fighting style’s improvised, fast-paced quality also emphasize Kate’s resourcefulness. With this and Birds of Prey last year, Winstead is becoming a bonafide action star and she convincingly pulls off both Kate’s fierce fighting style here and her pain after each hit.
Lest we fall into the same hero-worship that threatens to shatter Ani at any moment should she find out why Kate is so determined to protect her, though, if Kate has any flaw, it’s one of of logic. Kate seems convinced from the beginning that she’s been poisoned by the yakuza as revenge for what happened in Osaka. However, considering the world she moves in and the implications her wanting to quit and live a normal life might have for her employers, it strains belief slightly that she takes so long to imagine an alternative. Then again, this is a movie essentially about loyalty and atoning for mistakes–especially within complex families–so, it’s perhaps understandable that some things seem unimaginable even to someone trained to assassinate people from childhood.
Indeed, what makes Kate so impressive in the end isn’t just its kickass action scenes, but the emotional arcs driving them. We know our antiheroine has limited time to settle her accounts before she dies and both Aleem and Nicolas-Troyan never shy away the complex moral questions driving her. Yeah, Kate is a badass, but her mortality forces her to confront tough truths and by allowing for grey areas in both her and the other characters, Kate ultimately elevates its simple revenge movie premise. Perhaps a more thoughtless action extravaganza might have been more fun, but it wouldn’t have lingered the way Kate does.
