Kate (Netflix)

Title: Kate
Directed by: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan
Written by: Umair Aleem
Network: Netflix

Kate, an assassin with 24 hours to live (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), seeks revenge on the people who poisoned her. This happens just after she announced to her boss (Woody Harrelson, easily the best thing here but also just reprising his role from the Han Solo movie beat for beat) that she was quitting the assassination business. Gee. Wonder who could possibly be behind it all. What amazing plot twist will be revealed two thirds of the way through. I really cannot guess. Also I have severe brain damage and have never seen any revenge action movie ever before in my life.

If you’ve watched any of Netflix’s previous output—like “Old Guard”, “Extraction”, “Project Power” or “Titan”—you kind of know what to expect: Determinedly middle-brow fare with one big name Hollywood star and a script like something I might write. Narratively, there really is nothing new or original here. Our hero agrees to do one last job before quitting. The last job goes wrong! Oh noes! Now she’s been poisoned with a grain of Polonium and is immediately given 24 hours to live (a bit like the real-life case of Alexander Litvinenko, only it took three weeks for him to die). So a gender-swapped “Crank”, then. Kate begins to work her bloody, bullet-strewn way up the ladder of crime bosses until she reaches the top and gasp, twist, finds out her mentor was behind it all along.

Oh, and there’s an astonishingly foul-mouthed spoiled rich girl who gets dragged along because tough hero plus kid worked so well in “Extraction”. Also, weird little thing, but her name is Ani-chan, which is a strange name for a girl to have as “ani” means “older brother” in Japanese. I thought maybe it was a reference to the character’s gender fluidity or something, but no, nothing. She’s just a girl whose name happens to mean big brother. Odd.

If you can get past the predictability, then the visuals and action are entertaining enough.

There’s an almost amusing bit of “Die Hard” in the amount of shit the movie puts Kate (Mary) through before allowing her to finally succumb to the sweet embrace of death, including getting shot twice and stabbed in the face with a pair of scissors, in addition to the whole radiation poisoning thing. And I can’t help but suspect Mary was cast for her physical similarity to Sigourney Weaver—indeed as the movie progresses her hairstyle and look gets more and more Weaverish until I wondered if I was watching the wrong movie.*

*I was. Should’ve watched “Aliens” instead.

The camerawork during the fight scenes in particular is wonderfully wacky, flipping the image upside down when Kate lands on her back or with overhead shots spinning around as she throws the bad guys this way and that. There’s also a kitchen fight with a tattooed member of BTS that is visceral and crunchy in all the right ways.

Ultramodern Japan is shown here in all its pink neon cat glory, though my favorite scene was shot in a Lawson convenience store, just cos I got to shout at the screen “Hey, it’s a Lawson, a thing which I know exists.” I give the movie points for casting Japanese people in Japanese roles, instead of filling them with Chinese or Korean actors the way most productions seem to do (Hello, Altered Carbon). One or two scenes might overdo it, to the point I wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be modern-day Japan or some kind of cyberpunk future.

I’m not sure if the final scene was meant to be a damning commentary on the cheap, fake plastic sentimentality of these kinds of movies, but man does it (accidentally?) do it in style: Our hero gives up the ghost while bathed in the neon pink glow of a bloated quasi-Hello Kitty character that appears to be shitting cherry blossoms. Like, daaaaamn. “Your tears are as genuine as a second-rate, crassly commercial copy of a children’s cartoon character.” Ouch.

That’s the one shot in this movie that actually hits hard.