Avis des critiques

Another unimaginative woman-led action flick written and directed by men who telegraph their twists and lean on flashbacks instead of bothering to write character development, Kate mistakes “women can kill just as well as men!” for some sort of new idea. It isn’t.

There’s a cynical air to the lackluster proceedings, as if the filmmakers assume you’ll stumble across “Kate” and watch it simply because it’s there and you’re too lazy to scroll down the screen for something better. That appears to be Netflix’s rationale for their mid-budget actioners, and it can provide much satisfaction if there’s a good story welded to the set-pieces. But Umair Aleem’s script is so paint-by-numbers familiar that it leaves you wishing you’d watched one of the better movies it’s ripping off.

It's hard to imagine a more bare-boned plot as excuses for stylized violence go... there's not much mystery in the "why" of it all, and nary a beat that doesn't feel almost wholly predictable. The movie thus becomes one long bout of violence for its own sake, with the inevitability of Kate's fate only further detracting from any suspense about where the story is heading.

Through some strange alchemy, [“Kate”] works better than it has any right to, thanks in no small part to its charismatic leads, a heaping helping of style, and a story that is effective, surprisingly emotional and led by sober feelings of remorse and atonement.

There are few surprising moments. There’s a template to be followed and “Kate” does so, like clockwork... it’s a form-over-substance exercise... That said, if you’re signing up for an assassin revenge movie with Winstead entertainingly kicking ass, you’re going to get one.

The movie presents an eye-catching fantasy of a candy-colored Japanese underworld. But the exoticism feels as cheap as a whiff of a green tea and musk cologne called Tokyo wafting over a department store counter. Even Winstead, stoic in her fashionably boyish haircut, looks bored.

Subtle it's not: "Kate" is red-meat storytelling, all broad outlines and crunched bones. But there's a visual wit and visceral energy to it that other recent efforts... struggle to find.

“Kate” is “John Wick” meets “Die Hard” meets “Collateral” meets “Kill Bill all the Volumes” and we’ve seen it all before and you’re not going to get much in the way of original plot, but what you WILL get is a grindhouse of a good time with some bleak and wickedly sharp humor, screen-popping visuals and some pretty great fight choreography.

There’s nothing particularly inventive about "Kate"... but there’s also nothing particularly heinous in its execution, a to-the-point two-hour slab of pulp that slickly glides above a very low bar. The platform’s flatly directed, often incompetently choreographed churn of action content has meant that a sudden whiff of style and a glimpse of an actual location suddenly jolts one from a drift of sleep to a mild amount of attention.

"Kate" is about as routine as action thrillers get... technical wizardry can only take a film so far, and as the stylized violence becomes redundant as the film progresses, Kate’s style-over-substance sensibility takes on a particular garishness.

All told, ["Kate"] feels rather like a movie about white people appropriating the “cool” factor of Japanese crime thrillers for their own action flick, with little to say about the cultural divides inherent in the premise. That’s not to say it’s a cancellable offense, necessarily, but it just doesn’t do anything interesting with the setting.

It’s not a good sign that almost everything in the film seems to have come from somewhere else... Even if the combat choreography that made this vein of cinema so popular is up to snuff, and Winstead does handle her steps ably even as her character breaks down, this film should aspire to be more than a delivery system for a few solid shootouts.