The more I watched this movie, the more I became concerned. After Netflix released Kate on September 10th, it has been ranked as one of its most watched offerings for the past few days. So I started wondering, "Why is this movie so popular? Am I becoming old fashioned now in my views of thorough film criticism? Am I out of touch with the current trends and tastes of young viewers today?"
Kate is a painfully mundane action thriller about a young, skinny, white woman working as a covert assassin who goes off the rails to hunt down her killer before she dies from acute radiation poisoning. But wait for it . . . once she discovers she's been poisoned, she only has 24 hours left of her life.
Set in the mobster underworld of Tokyo, Kate has a little bit of visual interest with the fighting and chasing filmed under neon lights and in narrow alleyways. But not even that, and not even Mary Elizabeth Winstead's (10 Cloverfield Lane, 2016) facial expressions of tedious agony, can save this movie from flat dialogue and predictability.
Sometimes a film will have interesting ideas or exciting parts of a story, but it still fails because it can't bring all its separate elements together. Recent examples of films like this are Transcendence with Hugh Jackman (The Front Runner, 2018) or Malcolm and Marie with Zendaya (Spider-Man: Far from Home, 2019). Kate doesn't even have interesting ideas or excitement to begin with. It only seems to be interested in exploring the many ways a person can be stabbed or decapitated. (Guess what? There's a lot!)
Now that I've gotten all of that out of my system, maybe I'm not so out of touch or old fashioned after all. Sometimes movies are just bad. The only part of Kate I liked was one of the handsome Japanese gangsters (played by actor Kazuya Tanabe) and his amazingly pronounced angular cheekbones.
