So you want to raise an assassin from childhood, to turn them into the ultimate killing machine. Have you considered that this might simply lead to a maladjusted figure with a murderous resentment towards you? Just a thought. Anyway, Kate is a super assassin who has been slipped Polonium-204 whilst on a job in Osaka, and now has only a day to live. Will she track down her poisoner and get revenge? Will she protect a vulnerable child? Could her handler/adoptive father be behind all of this? Are we given a reason to care about this one bit?
Kate is the most derivative film I have seen in a long time. The basic premise is the plot of Crank, but taken way too seriously. Kate visually is a cross between Motoko Kusanagi and Ellen Ripley, and careful not to avoid missing any opportunity to rip every last detail off, she also finds the time to become the adoptive mother figure to an orphaned child, just like in Aliens. Hell, even the last Mary Elizabeth Winstead movie, Birds of Prey, also did "dangerous white woman adopts wayward Asian girl" routine. And Winstead was a former child assassin in that movie too!
Putting aside how unoriginal Kate is, it's a weak movie in practically every aspect. Plotwise, Kate's deadly poisoning gives her nose bleeds and some ugly skin lesions, but otherwise does nothing to prevent her storming around the city, getting into shootouts and fist fights. I wouldn't normally care about seeing realistic depictions of radiation poisoning in a movie, except this film wants to be taken so very seriously. Her poisoner is Yakuza boss Kijima, and to track him down she needs to find his advisor Renji. And to find him she has to go through lieutenant Jojima, who she reaches after finishing with Sato etc etc. It's a Matryoshka doll of busywork, leading us to some gangster villains we don't care about.
The film is badly shot, full of excessive shadows and night time scenes, and lit exclusively by coloured neon. It might look cool in promotional stills, but it obscures all the action and acting. It also means most of the scenes look the same. In a movie where the hero is on a clock, there is no sense of time progression. Meanwhile, the dialogue consists of people saying fuck over and over, in the absence of anything clever to say. I suffer a similar absence of anything positive to say about this film, I will end this review in kind. Fuck Kate.
Film Polonium? Oh, I am slain!
So you want to raise an assassin from childhood, to turn them into the ultimate killing machine. Have you considered that this might simply lead to a maladjusted figure with a murderous resentment towards you? Just a thought. Anyway, Kate is a super assassin who has been slipped Polonium-204 whilst on a job in Osaka, and now has only a day to live. Will she track down her poisoner and get revenge? Will she protect a vulnerable child? Could her handler/adoptive father be behind all of this? Are we given a reason to care about this one bit?
Kate is the most derivative film I have seen in a long time. The basic premise is the plot of Crank, but taken way too seriously. Kate visually is a cross between Motoko Kusanagi and Ellen Ripley, and careful not to avoid missing any opportunity to rip every last detail off, she also finds the time to become the adoptive mother figure to an orphaned child, just like in Aliens. Hell, even the last Mary Elizabeth Winstead movie, Birds of Prey, also did "dangerous white woman adopts wayward Asian girl" routine. And Winstead was a former child assassin in that movie too!
Putting aside how unoriginal Kate is, it's a weak movie in practically every aspect. Plotwise, Kate's deadly poisoning gives her nose bleeds and some ugly skin lesions, but otherwise does nothing to prevent her storming around the city, getting into shootouts and fist fights. I wouldn't normally care about seeing realistic depictions of radiation poisoning in a movie, except this film wants to be taken so very seriously. Her poisoner is Yakuza boss Kijima, and to track him down she needs to find his advisor Renji. And to find him she has to go through lieutenant Jojima, who she reaches after finishing with Sato etc etc. It's a Matryoshka doll of busywork, leading us to some gangster villains we don't care about.
The film is badly shot, full of excessive shadows and night time scenes, and lit exclusively by coloured neon. It might look cool in promotional stills, but it obscures all the action and acting. It also means most of the scenes look the same. In a movie where the hero is on a clock, there is no sense of time progression. Meanwhile, the dialogue consists of people saying fuck over and over, in the absence of anything clever to say. I suffer a similar absence of anything positive to say about this film, I will end this review in kind. Fuck Kate.