Directed by: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan
Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Miku Martineau, Woody Harrelson, Michiel Huisman
If you are looking for a good and very fast-paced action movie- this is the one you are looking for.
The idea is not very original: a contract killer gets poisoned and decides to go after the people who poisoned her. From that point, “Kate” is a compilation of several other movies and TV shows where a young orphan or street kid is recruited by a hidden organization of contact killers and is trained as an apprentice. And it’s always a girl. Why? Like girls are easier to be trained to kill people for money, or girls are just more ready to get violent than the boys? Or maybe it’s just trying to kill the myth- that the man is deadlier than the woman. They are equal in everything, including delivering a precise sniper shot to the head of the marked target.
The action in the movie is located in Osaka and Tokyo. Why? It could have been anywhere else. One reason could be that Netflix is interested in entering the Asain movie market. Other than that, it could be an attempt to show us a picture of the inner workings of criminal organizations and how cruel the actions of Yakuza (Japanese version of the mob) can be. We know that very well. It has been presented in lots of other movies, so repeating it is not necessary.
The fighting scenes in the movie are very solid. The action looks so real. The fight instructors and stunt team apparently did a great job here. Too much blood is one of the main problems with this kind of movie. You don’t need to be spilling gallons of red paint and pumping spray on the walls, floors, and everywhere. As an audience, we will survive very well without all those blood effects and we will still understand that the physical execution of the enemy is the primary aim of both sides involved in the fighting segments of the action.
Also what you don’t need in this movie is such a large amount of Japanese pop and hip-hop music. Obviously the Tokyo atmosphere is what the director is looking for but this far east pop sound is so ugly, it is just hurting your ears and it does not do the movie any good. It is just annoying and irritating.
Parts of car chase scenes of the movie adopt a Tokyo drift style and they look like a video game but that is not so bad. It looks refreshing, colourful, fast… and a little furious.
Only Netflix knows how this project stands from a financial perspective, in terms of budget and return, but if you ignore that part (and it’s very possible that it’s not going to be great), then you have one decent movie. Really refreshing movie in parts especially considering the total dominance of comic book movies in the action movie genre.
