With 24 hours left to live, assassin still has job to do
As the title professional assassin “Kate,” Mary Elizabeth Winstead has had it.
Following a traumatic sniper hit early in this Netflix bloodbath of a film, which starts streaming Friday, Sept. 10, Kate tells the avuncular handler Varrick (Woody Harrelson), who has groomed her to kill since childhood, that she’ll fulfill their contract to take out a Tokyo yakuza chief. But then she’s out of the business for good.
“I want a life,” Kate explains. “I never had one.”
“Two trips to Walmart, you’ll be back,” Varrick confidently predicts.
But Kate isn’t just over the lifestyle spiritually, she’s also had it physically — and that’s aside from the many bruises, cuts and gunshot wounds she receives while taking out half of the Japanese underworld. Someone slipped Polonium 204 into her Cabernet, and Winstead’s lean, battered body displays increasingly grotesque radiation effects over the 24 hours she has left to live.
You may think that this plot’s elements — cribbed from the old film noir “D.O.A.” and every criminal-who-takes-one-last-job movie since the beginning of time — have had it too, and you’d be mostly right. Except that “Kate,” directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan (“The Huntsman: Winter’s War”) and written by Umair Aleem (“Extraction”), takes a surprise late turn toward nurture and nuance that comes close to working. Not everyone will buy it, but it’s a heartfelt variation on the genre’s tired revenge/redemption formulas.
And Winstead sells it. Though she’s surfing a hard action wave at the moment — the actress’ previous two films were “Birds of Prey” and “Gemini Man” — she plays Kate with the same kind of no-nonsense, behavioral honesty tapped in any number of her fine dramatic turns (“All About Nina,” “Smashed” and the third season of “Fargo” offer a few examples).
For a while, though, it seems like Winstead is wasting a lot of solid nuance when Kate’s not parkouring through cramped, neon-spattered alleys and high-rises swathed in video projections, hunting down the culprits who poisoned her. But then she kidnaps Ani (versatile newcomer Miku Patricia Martineau), the bratty tween niece of crime boss Kijima ( Jun Kunimura of “Kill Bill” and “The Wailing”). Their reluctant but inevitable bonding is persuasive, due in large part to the credible emotional groundwork Winstead has laid. Maybe Kate is a real person, and not just the Terminator that Ani and everything else about the film imagine her to be.
Shot mostly in Thailand in place of Tokyo, “Kate” logs a lot of borderline imaginative, gory MMA-style beatdowns. Winstead did many of her own stunts, most impressively in a penthouse match with music star Miyavi, who played the prison camp commandant in “Unbroken.”
There are volleys of bullets, some sword business, a yakitori bar demolition, the most ludicrous fake car chase this side of a “Fast & Furious” sequel, and chin-to-cheek knife action for those who like that sort of thing. I suppose homages are paid to anime, samurai and Japanese gangster films throughout, but Nicolas-Troyan appears to be on an exoticism kick too. Mainly, though, “Kate” looks like most other productions from 87North, the company behind such cinematic cage fights as “Atomic Blonde” and the “John Wick” films.
Honestly, this could have been called “Nuclear Brunette.” But with heart.