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!

 

 

 

 

Bunraku (2010)

We finish our big screen to DTV week with Bunraku, starring Josh Hartnett, Woody Harrelson, Demi Moore, and Ron Perlman. This is one that popped up on Watch Instantly recently, and I was instantly intrigued (no pun intended). I didn't know much about it, hadn't really seen much on it, but the running time, just over two hours, gave me a little pause. Seldom do the terms "DTV" and "two-hour running time" pair well. Maybe this will be an exception.

Bunraku takes place in the future, after a nuclear war, where the world is trying to rebuild. Guns are outlawed, so the best swordsmen rule the day, the strongest among them is a mysterious woodcutter (Ron Perlman), who has recruited nine other great warriors to cement his power and create a police state, the strongest one east of the Atlantic. Enter two mysterious men: Josh Hartnett, a cowboy in a world without guns; and Yoshi, a samurai without a sword. Joined together by a barman (Woody Harrelson), whose old flame (Demi Moore) is now shacking up with the woodcutter, they now seek to bring down the woodcutter and his reign of tyranny. Can they defy the odds and make it happen?



This movie was amazing. It had everything, great martial arts, cool visuals, cool characters, and this mix of influences from all over the place: Westerns, Film Noir, Nikkatsu Noir, samurai films, Japanese theater, Weimar Republic Germany, comic books, and video games. So often, I watch movies and say "why can't they be like this?" or "why can't they just do that?", and this finally did it. Josh Hartnett was surprisingly solid as one of the heroic leads, Harrelson and Perlman were as good as you'd expect in their roles, and everyone else seemed to get what this was about too and performed accordingly. Elements like the 1920s musical aesthetic blended in and enhanced the atmosphere, as opposed to standing out and being the kind of thing the movie patted itself on the back for-- which is usually what brings a film like this down, and fortunately didn't here. For me, all of this worked, and I really enjoyed it.

Woody Harrelson has always been an interesting case in Hollywood. Even when he broke out in the early 90s after his run on Cheers, his roles ran the gamut from White Men Can't Jump to Indecent Proposal to Natural Born Killers, and that was something that didn't change like you'd expect after he became one of the bigger leading men in Hollywood, which I've always liked about him. My favorite film of his recently was The Messenger, a part that earned him his second Oscar nomination. Here he plays a wise, off-beat mentor character, and does it as well as he does everything else. If you're a Harrelson fan like I am, you won't be disappointed.



His Indecent Proposal co-star, Demi Moore, has a much smaller part as Ron Perlman's lover. It's interesting when you think of Indecent Proposal, because that one was about two young Hollywood up-and-comers starring opposite a veteran like Robert Redford; now the two up-and-comers are the veterans, and in some ways, beyond veteran-dom. Neither quite made that Redford level, which is probably more a testament to him than it is a knock on them. Though it looks like her days as the 8-figure leading lady are past her, she isn't totally relegated to DTV-dom either, with the most recent film she was in, the ensemble piece Margin Call, nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay.

Among the other co-stars, there's Ron Perlman, who I mentioned above. He's rocking some gray dreadlocks, as if he's the older guy that works at the local record store (tell me, doesn't every decent sized town in America have that guy working at their local record store?). He's great though as the head baddie, equal parts sinister and tired warrior. His second in command is played by Kevin McKidd, who I remember as Tommy from Trainspotting, but imdb also lists as starring in Grey's Anatomy. I don't know if he's a trained martial artist, or if they made heavy use of stunt doubles, but either way, he was an equally great baddie, a combination of swordsman and Gestapo head. Then we had Gackt, a Japanese pop singer, who played Yoshi. He looked kind of like Michael Jackson in his Dangerous days, only with a bigger nose. Again, like McKidd, I don't know what kind of martial artist he is in real life, but whether it was a stunt double or him, he was very believable as the hero. Finally, his uncle is played by Shun Sugata. He's been in things like Ichi the Killer and Tokyo Gore Police, so I'm sure for some of our readers he'd be more recognizable than he would for others.



Finally, I can't complete this review without discussing Josh Hartnett. For me he was a revelation. If you'd said ahead of time "dude, Bunraku has Josh Hartnett as a renegade cowboy type that's really good at martial arts and has a mustache", I'd be skeptical, and I would've been wrong. It's like he got everything the people making this film envisioned for his role, and he made it all happen. He's got that Western vibe, but in a very Jo Shishido Nikkatsu Noir-esque kind of way-- which makes sense, because Nikkatsu Noir flicks borrowed a lot from American Westerns, but still, for him to pull it off isn't easy when you're not Jo Shishido. I've liked Josh Hartnett in a lot of other films I've seen him in, like The Virgin Suicides, 40 Days and 40 Nights, and, most recently, the indie flick August, which also starred David Bowie. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised then that he nailed this one out of the park.

This whole film is nailed out of the park actually (for my international readers that aren't familiar with baseball, "nailed out of the park" is a slang term for hitting a home run), everything I could've wanted out of a film that drew from so many places and made it all work so well. And that two hour running time? Forgot all about it. If you haven't seen this yet I suggest you do, especially my Americans readers that can get this on Watch Instantly.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1181795/