Mary Elizabeth Winstead has long been overdue for the revenge thriller role she got to chew on in Kate. She’s been teasing just this sort of thing ever since Sky High, and through roles in 10 Cloverfield Lane, Death Proof, Scott Pilgrim, and most recently Gemini Man and Birds of Prey. But with the lead all to herself, Winstead kills it in another awesome female-led assassin flick in a summer packed full of them. Familiar story beats aside, the film features stylish, glossy, neon-lit action on the streets of Tokyo, given polish from director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan (The Huntsman: Winter’s War). If you’ve watched your share of these movies as I have you’ll dig every second of Kate, and if you haven’t, it might make you a convert.
As you can probably tell, this shit is my jam. Winstead plays a familiar archetype of the genre, the killer forced to protect a child. But first, her character Kate, who has been doing wetwork for her handler V (Woody Harrelson) since she was a child, has a mission in Osaka to take care of. Unfortunately, it’s to murder the powerful father of Ani (Miku Patricia Martineau), and Kate can’t go through with it. However, she’s forced into taking the shot and killing Ani’s dad. Months later, Kate just wants to get out of this bloody life and be normal. But that shit ain’t happenin’. You know that already. Somebody instead feeds her a lethal dose of radiation poisoning, and Kate has to live, albeit briefly, with the news she only has 24hrs left to live.
It’s avengin’ time! But not before reconnecting with Ani and forging an unlikely bond with the girl whose father she murdered, making for an awkward mentorship to say the least.
While it’s easy to poke at Kate for being familiar, the stylish presentation is anything but. The film unfolds with the sheen of a comic book, with blistering splash page-worthy action. While so many of these movies look to emulate John Wick and its graceful style of racking up the body count, Nicolas-Troyan has clearly been studying from Gareth Evans’ The Raid school of brutality. Some of the kills here are grisly as fuck, with edged weapons appropriately used to slice and dice hordes of yakuza. The violence is, thankfully, over-the-top and a bit silly as well, matching the film’s welcome tone. This shouldn’t be serious or grim, and while not as vivid an experience as Gunpowder Milkshake there is definitely a fun, derisory streak coursing through it.
We should be talking about Winstead getting her own action franchise, as well. Perhaps Kate can be the start of something for Netflix the way Extraction and The Old Guard have become? She proves here what we’ve always known, which is that she can more than handle the physical aspects of this type of role. What’s more, she’s just an incredibly good actress. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that being a great actor makes for a great action movie star, but it doesn’t hurt. And Winstead is more than capable of balancing Kate’s eagerness for revenge with the constant realization that she’s going to die no matter what she does. There’s also the relationship Kate has with Ani, which is full of secrets and regrets. It’s a more complicated performance than Winstead is likely to get credit for, but I won’t sit here and act like it was a stretch for her.
There are certainly more contemplative revenge movies out there, but even they are treading on well-worn territory to anyone who is a fan of this genre. It’s the aesthetics that matter most; the performances, the atmosphere, the “cool” factor. Kate has them all, and there’s no way a little thing like poison could keep Winstead down. There are more fights to be had, more people to kill. 24 hours just isn’t enough.
Kate hits Netflix on September 10th.
