Kate (2021)

With Netflix upping their prices (again), we were considering dumping them because we don't watch much on there, but with that in mind, I needed to clear out my queue first, and I saw this as one Netflix suggested. The trailer made it look pretty good, so despite the 105-minute runtime, I decided to take the plunge. In addition to us, among the 120+ other critic reviews on IMDb, our friends Todd Gaines at Bulletproof Action and Mitch Lovell at the Video Vacuum have covered this as well.

Kate has Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the eponymous hero, an assassin trained from a young age by Cheers alum Woody Harrelson to be a ruthless expert assassin. After a job where a child (Miku Martineau) witnesses her father being killed, Kate wants out, and tells Harrelson so. That leads us to the one last job scenario, after which we find out Kate has been poisoned and only has 24-48 hours to live, which leads us to the revenge/up against the clock scenario, and then in trying to exact her revenge, Kate finds the girl who witnessed Kate kill her father, so we now also have the assassin with the young kid scenario. Will Kate be able to manage all these scenarios before she dies?

Among all these scenarios, as you can imagine, at the end we also had the "put on your eye protection as the loose ends start flying together" scenario; but on top of all that, I was left with the "so what?" scenario. Yes, the visuals and action scenes were great, which I appreciated; but with all this well-worn territory, it was like "what is this movie giving me that I don't already have?" The answer to that might be "it's an action film, just go with it and enjoy the action," but if that's the case, this should've been twenty minutes shorter, and it at least should give me something new I can glom onto. Mary Elizabeth Winstead was great as the Huntress in Birds of Prey, but this character was much more one-dimensional, which we've seen so many times before that it obviated the need to cast someone as good as her in the part. The plot twists were so obvious you could see them coming a from the first ten minutes, which, again I'm not so upset about, except why then make the movie so long when we all know from the start where we're headed? This movie's not horrible by any stretch, and as I said above, I enjoyed certain aspects of it; I just think for as unremarkable as it ultimately was, it didn't need to be packaged as if it were something more than that.

This is our first Mary Elizabeth Winstead film we've covered on the site, and I think she did really well here, but it felt like the material didn't give her as much to work with, like had she had the chance, she could've done even more and made this thing really great. As I mentioned above, I liked her in Birds of Prey, but that film was about making multiple three-dimensional female characters, and being both written by and directed by a woman, I think we saw the result where we had even supporting characters like The Huntress having more depth than this film's main character. I'm not saying you need to have women writing or directing for the female character to have depth, see Columbiana; nor am I saying I need my action leads to have more depth, it's more like I was hoping for it when I saw Winstead was the star, and if the film is going to be packaged as more than just your run of the mill actioner, that's part of what I'm expecting. At the very least though, this and Birds of Prey hopefully will lead to more great stuff action from Winstead in the future.

Let's come back to the film's length, because I think that dovetails with an overall trend in films that I don't like. Do you know why I haven't seen The Batman yet? It's almost 3 hours long. Do you know how long Batman: Dead End is? 8 minutes, and it might be the best Batman ever. Avengers: End Game was also 3 hours, and I watched that at home over two sittings, and it made zero sense to me that a comic book movie needed to take that long, especially when you consider one of the best comic book movies ever, The Punisher with Dolph Lundren, is only 89 minutes (did you like the left-digit bias I did there?) When I look at a lot of the new action films on Netflix, 2-hour runtimes seem to be the norm, making this one at 105 on the shorter side. I get it if the film is Ran, Kurosawa making an adaptation of King Lear set in medieval Japan should be 3 hours--except it isn't, it's only 2 hours and 42 minutes. Action and comic book movies should be 90 minutes long. A more serious drama maybe in the 100-105 minute range; and then epics like Ran in the 160-180-minute range. That's it. (You may have found a hole in my own rules, considering the old 60s Batman film adaptation was 105 minutes, but it had 4 Bat-villains in it, so maybe that's another rule: you can go a little longer if you have more villains--and Bat shark repellent spray, that helps.)

As I mentioned above, this movie really looks nice, and I think going back to the runtime thing, you can have style over substance if it's in a shorter package. The thing is though, where does "looks nice" get us nowadays, when you have Target TV ads with these big colors that pop off the screen. Hell, I watch NHL games on ESPN+ on my standard HD TV, and a Stars-Preds game with those green and gold jerseys they have also looks nice--though man, I'm not a fan of those Devils third-color jerseys at all! The point I'm trying to make is, with digital coloring technology, everything looks nice, and it's almost like I'm just giving this movie credit for not going with the standard, drab, washed-out, color-less thing most "edgy" TV shows and movies are going with nowadays; but maybe the hope is, as more movies try what this one did, we'll start to see a shift back to more color in our movies, instead of less.

Finally, the film's title, Kate, not only makes it hard to find on IMDb, because I only get actors named Kate in my autofill, but also, I end up with the song "Wait" by White Lion in my head whenever I see it. Many people don't realize, "Wait" is based on an old Danish folktale about the unrequited love between two 14th century farmers, one of whom was named Olaf. You can hear it in the lyrics, "Olaf!... Olaf!... Wait... wait... I never had a chance to love you." Now if they ever made that into a movie, I could see that working at 105 minutes. (And before anyone starts searching for this online, I'm totally full of shit here... but I'd still like to see that movie made.)

And with that, let's wrap this up. Kate isn't horrible, and it has some great points, the problem is, at 105 minutes, it's sold to us as something bigger than that, and ultimately falls under the weight of it's own tropes, cliches, and one-dimensionality. As of this writing--and probably forever--you can get this on Netflix.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7737528

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!