Kate Movie Review: Mary Elizabeth Winstead steals the show as a complex, questioning assassin

Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s titular character Kate reminds me a lot of Blake Lively’s Stephanie Patrick from The Rhythm Section. They may hail from vastly different circumstances, but there is a striking vulnerability at the core of the two women. Kate is accorded so much intensity and depth that she is capable of sniping targets unemotionally for years, and yet, experiences a crisis of conscience while assassinating a man being accompanied by his teenage daughter. The film pays some homage to past and present mainstays of the genre, finding itself as a Kill Bill meets John Wick sort of feature. The action/combat sequences (hand-to-hand, guns, Samurai swords, you name it) are stylistically pieced together and ingeniously shot, making them a treat for the aesthete’s senses. Set in the heart of Tokyo, the Japanese music featured ranges from pop to punk to hard rock, distinguishing itself as one of the complementary characters in the story. Some scenes don’t work nearly as well sans the OST’s required auditory effect. Kate doesn’t say all that much, and we are given but a string of brilliantly arranged snippets from the past to provide us with a basic background of her upbringing. It is through Winstead’s sheer emotive force that we are transported into her character’s pain, her all-consuming guilt, her need for some form of redemption, some form of closure, before it’s too late. Add flair and a unique sense of style to that! Even when bruised, bloodied and staggering from the aftereffects of a deadly toxin, she has your admiration and support! Those who have made her into this ruthless hitwoman are wary of the day the tables will turn.

Director - Cedric Nicolas-Troyan

Cast – Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Woody Harrelson, Miku Patricia Martineau, Tadanobu Asano, Jun Kunimura 

Streaming On – Netflix

I wouldn’t go as far as to compare the artistic presentation of the film’s violence to that of Tarantino’s touch, but the influence is undeniable. Kate possesses certain shades of the Bride from Kill Bill as well. The overwhelming need to empathise with such an antiheroic character – keeping in mind all the terrible things she has done, all the lives she has extinguished – comes from the fact that she is human, she is flawed, and she does feel. She isn’t an out-and-out sociopath with snazzy gun-toting skills and fancy shades. She is a damaged person who was manipulated as a child, brought up to be a certain way. Despite the fact that this is the only life she has known since her early teens, she hasn’t entirely lost the ability to think for herself, to question her reality. Her handler Varrick (Woody Harrelson) has raised her in the absence of parental love or guidance; his is the only affection (if one can go so far as to call it that) she has known. As her trainer, there is only so much he can provide emotionally – how else is he to prepare her to be the most clinically efficient assassin out there? What she needs (has perhaps always needed) is agency…to have the power to be her own woman. Kate begins growing out of her mentor’s shadow as soon as she’s poisoned with a deadly toxin - revenge for a failed assassination attempt on an influential Yakuza member. Her full range of human emotions comes to the fore as she grapples with her own mortality.

This assassin film, as the title suggests, is all about its tortured central character. Yes, there is the teenage Ani (Miku Patricia Martineau), who Kate sees her younger self in (her head tells her to leave, her heart tells her to stay and protect), and handler Varrick, who is convinced of the extensive influence over his ward, and the mysterious, senior Yakuza member, Kijima (Jun Kunimura), purportedly responsible for the poisoning, but it is on her that everything revolves. For all the prodigious talent that is Woody Harrelson, his Varrick needed better writing. The man’s scheming is too predictable for my liking. The odd bond between Kate and Ani is one of the film’s high points. And it is Ani, and the child’s ultimate well-being, that becomes Kate’s moral purpose. It is perhaps not authentic enough to believe that all members of a high-ranking Yakuza family speak fluent English when called upon to do so, but there is enough Japanese to go around to offset that dynamic.

While Kate does have its flaws and does borrow from similar efforts of the past, it keeps you heavily invested in its main character. Time is of the essence, and she does everything at her disposal to convince the audience and herself that her whole life wasn’t a lie and that her recently acquired conscience will see her through to some form of closure. Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s superlative lead performance lends credence to a highly complex hitwoman who is slowly dying from within – and I’m not just referring to the fatal toxin ravaging her system.