Kate

Dir: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan

Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has been trained as an assassin since she was a child. During a job in Osaka, she kills a man in front of his teenage daughter. Feeling guilty, she tells her handler, Varrick (Woody Harrelson) that she wants out, but there’s one more job to finish. During that job, Kate is poisoned by the yakuza and, with less than a day to live, goes looking for vengeance.

I like Die Hard 4.0 [aka: Live Free or Die Hard] more than most, sure, it’s barely a Die Hard movie, but I like it on its own merits as a big, stupid action film. Since I first saw it though, I’ve always thought it could have done more with Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s fierce performance as Lucy McClane. Happily, in the past couple of years, Winstead has started to capitalise on the potential I thought she showed as an action star, first in Gemini Man, then as Huntress in Birds of Prey and now as Joan Wick… sorry, Kate.

Kate is a patchwork of old ideas. The story takes classic noir DOA’s premise of a person investigating their own murder and ties it to a revenge actioner, with shades of Leon in the relationship that eventually develops between Kate and the mobster’s niece (Miku Martineau) she kidnaps for blackmail purposes. It’s all extremely obvious and pretty much the entire audience will be able to call the final villain from very early on but, as with so much of the genre, the story is really just a skeleton on which to hang the action.

To his credit, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan (The Huntsman: Winter’s War) delivers a kinetic and colourful film that keeps you on board through sheer momentum, never really giving you time, in the moment at least, to care that the plot is threadbare and that Kate has approximately two traits where you’d hope a character would be. While it’s clearly shot on location, the Tokyo setting is largely set dressing rather than something the film feels particularly embedded in, but that set dressing often looks pretty spectacular, from a geisha house that hosts the film’s first, and probably best, fight to the car that Kate steals which, the second she turns it on, lights up with neon and blasts out Japanese rock band Band Maid’s Blooming (the band also appear, playing a different song, in a concert scene). 

Most of the action is very good, which shouldn’t be a surprise with John Wick 3 and Birds of Prey stunt coordinator Jonathan Eusebio playing the same role here and serving as second unit director. Though Winstead is clearly doing a good amount of her own fighting, and is largely excellent at it, credit should also go to her double, Elisabeth P. Carpenter. The action, for the most part, is dynamic and bloody. The aforementioned geisha house sequence sees Winstead ploughing through an array of yakuza, largely with knives. It feels indebted to John Wick and The Raid, but also, in the way it uses blood splatter, particularly at the end of the sequence, to Japanese action films. The only exception to this trend of good action sequences is a glaring one; a penthouse set fight in which everything appears to have gone wrong. Japanese musician and actor Miyavi cameos in this sequence, and I can only wonder if they simply didn’t have the time to rehearse or do as many takes as were needed with him. Much of the time, this fight feels as though it is moving at three-quarter speed. Throughout, there are shockingly obvious missed and pulled impacts. In the background, there’s equally misguided and poorly shot comic business with Miku Martineau trying to load a gun. It’s a genuinely terrible scene in the middle of a film that otherwise has solid action throughout.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead is, whatever she’s in, one of those actors who makes the film around her better. She digs in here and, despite not having much to play, and the writing never making the relationship between her and Martineau’s often grating Ani convincing, she delivers on the physicality of the role. For most of the film, and increasingly as it goes on, Kate is a wreck. From Winstead we get a performance of a woman trying desperately (and, to be fair, often wildly implausibly), to extend her last gasp. Through it all, Winstead holds the camera with her customary charisma, seldom more so than walking in for the final confrontation; shades on, cigarette dangling from her mouth, backed by a phalanx of machine gun-wielding yakuza. In a way it’s a shame that we know from the beginning that Kate can’t be saved, because Winstead makes enough of an impression that I’d happily watch another film with this character, certainly much more so than the franchise threatened at the end of Kate Beckinsale’s similar, but far worse, Jolt.

So, why not a higher grade? For as fun as it can be, there’s not much to Kate. There’s nothing to really invest in. Ani, the one character we might have an investment in is, unfortunately, written to be an irritant. Equally while the Japanese cast, including Tadanobu Asano and Jun Kunimura, make what they can of the material, there isn't much depth to the villains, or to the depiction of Japanese characters on the whole. That all being the case, and all aspects of the ending being obvious from the off, it’s difficult to get much more out of the action sequences than an occasional ‘that was cool’. While the action is good, it’s not quite of the very top rank. Jonathan Eusebio and his stunt team do some sterling work, but clearly former effects artist Cedric Nicolas-Troyan doesn’t have the same innate understanding of action that John Wick director and former stuntman Chad Stahelski seems to. Overall then, Kate is a fun time, but one that only lingers until the credits run.

★★★