Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Kate’ on Netflix, Where An Assassin Marked For Death Kills Her Way To The Truth

Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s poisoned assassin has one very personal mission to complete before she kicks the bucket in Kate (Netflix), a stylized exercise in genre filmmaking and extended fight sequences from the director of The Huntsman: Winter’s War and writer of Extraction. That mission? Simple: find the poisoners and dispatch their asses. But in the underworld Kate inhabits, the truth and who’s telling it is a lot more difficult to uncover.

KATE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Kate gets its kicks from establishing a brief timeline for its titular character, an assassin handy with rifles, pistols, edge weapons and her trusty fists, and setting her on a pathway to some semblance of satisfaction. It isn’t long after we meet her in the midst of killing a mark that Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is poisoned. It’s “polonium-204” that’s punched her ticket — no antidote, no extended life. So Kate descends into the Tokyo underworld to discover who slipped her the mickey, and tangles with an ever-increasing number of yakuza foot soldiers while she stays ambulatory with auto injections of stimulants. Varrick (Woody Harrelson), her executive-level handler in this assassin’s life, isn’t offering a whole lot of help, so Kate abducts mouthy teenager Ani (Miku Martineau) as a bargaining chip — her uncle Kajima (Jun Kunimura) sits atop the yakuza clan responsible for Kate’s impending demise.

Kate director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan sometimes employs a camera that spins around, either matching the barrel roll of the car Kate is crashing in or following the flailing body of a henchman she’s just sliced apart. But he also keeps the camera remarkably aware of the spatial chaos during a ten-on-one pitched battle amidst the shoji screens of a Japanese club, and amplifies the neon murk as Kate and Ani tumble through nighttime Tokyo in search of Kajima. The thrilling fight choreography and moody atmosphere are effective enough to maintain forward motion, and the film is aided immensely by Winstead’s ability to play an increasingly bloodied and bruised Kate to the hilt, even though the script stalls out whenever there isn’t gunplay in an entertainment district or knives being thrust through necks.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? What Kate really reminds you of is how great Mary Elizabeth Winstead is. She brought Huntress to the screen with aplomb in Birds of Prey, of course, but Winstead’s knack for physical roles was key to the otherwise rather flawed Gemini Man as well as her turn in 10 Cloverfield Lane. And Winstead’s tightly-coiled emotional state and raw-boned presence were the motor at the center of the 2018 indie drama All About Nina.

Performance Worth Watching: “All of you asshole hyenas getting fat off of my dad’s carcass!” Newcomer Miku Martineau really leans into the role of Ani, the misfit yakuza niece who forms an unlikely bond with Kate. Only a few minutes spent with the assassin and she’s already threatening mobsters to their face and twisting conventional teen indifference into something serrated and closer to junior badass territory.

Memorable Dialogue: “I’ll be dead before the night’s over!” Ani complains to Kate at one point, but her captor has another hard-bitten one liner ready in the hopper. “That makes two of us.” With her mouth a flat line, her finger on the trigger, and her mind on the mayhem and the mayhem on her mind, Winstead plays Kate close to the bone and cold-blooded to a fault. And why shouldn’t she? We’re watching Kate’s final mortal act transpire.

Sex and Skin: Nothing much here.

Our Take: Do all of the secret assassin societies at work in film today have an annual meeting somewhere? A union? A guild? (Dan Aykroyd wanted fellow freelance hitman John Cusack to join his fledgling union in Grosse Pointe Blank, but those overtures were shot full of holes.) With John Wick and the other members in good standing with the High Table transforming New York City into a battleground, and the League of Shadows lurking about, and ancillary groups like the culture of assassins in Netflix’s recent Gunpowder Milkshake regularly unloading munitions on each other, you’d think the vaguely defined authority Kate works for would run into trouble finding uncompromised “marks.” Isn’t there a finite number of crime bosses, shot callers, and government-issue evil doers to go around? Where’s the trade union regulation? We won’t ever know, or at least not this time, because Kate’s organization isn’t defined, it’s only embodied. Woody Harrelson’s Varrick is the assassin’s handler, mother, father, employer — and someone we trust less with every dwindling moment of his screen time.

The bigger questions about backstory and framework that Kate doesn’t ask appear like thought bubbles and then dissipate. Thus free from the constraints of place and precedent, the film becomes an interconnected series of shooting galleries, or suites of video game levels, with a bleeding, wheezing, but still keen-for-killing Kate barreling through successive throngs of yakuza in her death’s door quest for satisfaction. (A deadly encounter with a mob world higher-up played by Japanese musician Miyavi makes terrific use of space, transforming a modernist penthouse into an arsenal of makeshift murder weapons.) It’s more exhausting with each level, but still possible to ride the style and brutal fisticuffs all the way to Kate’s inevitable finish line.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Led by a resilient, physically propulsive performance from Mary Elizabeth Winstead, high style and higher body counts combine to propel Kate past its dimly imagined world of assassins for hire and murky professional double crosses.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Kate on Netflix