Kate on Netflix: Mary Elizabeth Winstead action-thriller misses the mark

Netflix’s new action thriller almost delivers on two crucial counts but widely misses the mark on the most important point.

When gritty action thrillers are a dime a dozen – especially with the influx of them on streaming services – what do you want out of one?

To be astounded by fight choreography so inventive it’s balletic? Sure, that would be swell. Splashes of blood and stylised violence for a visceral reaction? Yes, of course.

How about some pathos and emotional grounding so you can be invested in the lead character’s fate even if the story stretches the bounds of logic? Definitely, otherwise there’s no real reason to stick it out for 110 minutes.

Kate, streaming from today on Netflix, is aiming for all of these elements. But it doesn’t quite get there. It gets close on the first two counts but misses widely on the last one.

Directed with some visual panache by French filmmaker Cedric Nicolas-Troyan (The Hunstman: Winter’s War), from a lifeless and overly earnest script by Umair Aleem, Kate borrows heavily from its predecessors in the genre but never gives us a reason to care about it.

Its tired story and flat characterisations mean you’re just counting minutes until the next shoot-out or sword fight.

Cool shirt.

Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is a professional assassin whose sharpshooter skills means she never misses her target. Her handler and father figure Varrick (Woody Harrelson) raised and trained her since she was a child orphaned by a traumatic event.

Some months after a job in Osaka which required a regretful compromise, Kate decides to throw in the towel. She wants a normal life with a white picket fence. But before that, she has one last mission involving the head of a yakuza.

Across the rooftops, onsens, nightclubs, tearooms and bars of urban playground Tokyo (a street chase in crowded Shinjuku, shopping for supplies in a Lawson’s convenience store, jogging along the pedestrian walkways above Shibuya crossing), Kate creates chaos as the bodies pile up.

The premise – similar to 1950 film noir classic D.O.A. – is that just before her final job, Kate is poisoned by a fatal dose of plutonium 204. With less than a day left to live, she’s out to find who’s responsible.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead with Miku Martineau.

Along the way, she picks up Ani (Miku Martineau) the brash and pained teenage daughter of the man she killed in Osaka – much like another recent female assassin thriller, Gunpowder Milkshake, which relies on a similar killer-and-daughter-of-man-she-killed pairing.

No accusations of plagiarism here – Kate and Gunpowder Milkshake went into production within months of each other, it’s just interesting we often get symmetrical set-ups at the same time.

Generally, finding the guilty party to your fatal poisoning is reason enough to go on a butchering spree through half of Tokyo but neither Kate’s writing or Winstead’s performance convinces you she’s all that fussed about it.

There’s a one-note steeliness to Winstead’s countenance here, which doesn’t stack up with her past work, whether that’s as the devilish Nikki Swango in Fargo or the defiant Michelle in 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Even as another ruthless assassin, Helena/The Huntress, in Birds of Prey, Winstead balanced the athleticism and discipline of her character with the vulnerability and awkwardness that comes from being orphaned by violence.

If you’re counting at home, Winstead has indeed portrayed two highly trained killers whose parents were murdered in as many years.

Kate is streaming on Netflix.

But Kate is an empty vessel who feels as if she has no history or discernible motivations. And that’s barely even on Winstead because the character clearly wasn’t there on the page.

Without any compelling characters (although Jun Kinumura at least makes a shallow impression as the yakuza boss waxing lyrical about family, trust and regret) and wasting the likes of Harrelson, Michiel Huisman and Tadanobu Asano, Kate could have at least balanced out the boredom with a ludicrous story.

Often, in action thrillers, the more outlandish the story, the better the ride. You’ve already been asked to buy that Bob Odenkirk will viciously beat down half a dozen Russian gangsters on a bus or that Charlize Theron’s triple-crossing spy will survive a submerged car in an East Berlin river.

If the action is going to be bonkers, we’re more than happy for the story to be as well.

If there is one saving grace in Kate, it’s that the action sequences range from perfectly serviceable to the occasional visual sparkage, undoubtedly drawing from Nicolas-Troyan’s visual effects background.

But to stand out in a crowded genre, Kate needed to do more than that.

Rating: 2/5

Kate is streaming on Netflix from Friday, September 10

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