What started out as an action-thriller with great potential, Netflix’s Kate quickly flopped and did not deliver on what it could have been.
The film starts out in a high-stakes situation where the titular assassin, Kate, is tasked with killing a local Yakuza crime lord: a mission she attempts to get out of because his daughter is present. Once the mission is over and the man is dead, she goes out to a bar, where she has her last mission before she retires, only to get poisoned by the man talking to her. After finding this out, she decides to go on a hunt for the man who did it.
In her hunt, she takes the daughter of the man she killed and takes on the crime organization of Tokyo that her dad and uncle ran. In the end, she finds that the man who raised her, Varrick (Woody Harrelson), was the one working with the crime organization to kill Kate.
In a complete twist, Kate kills the man who meant so much to her and raised her since she was a girl. It was an exciting act and moment of satisfaction for Kate.
There are many questions that were not entirely thought-out by the writers. Why is Kate an assassin? We know Varrick poisoned her because she was retiring, but why does she have to die? Why does Varrick team with the bad guys? Why does Kate team with the bad guys? Why is the criminal organization so horrible, and what is it that they do? It’s stated that they are the enemy, but what is it that they do? None of these were answered. and it was quite annoying.
The plot doesn’t make much sense, and the girl Kate befriends is very annoying in parts of the story. The first 20 minutes were action-packed and entertaining, and Kate was a complete badass. There should be action in an action movie, but there is such a thing as too much action. The violence has to be paired with the story, there just shouldn’t be action for action’s sake every 2 minutes. The amount of bullets and stab wounds the protagonist takes while still being poisoned is too much, and then, she is healed seconds after.
The one bright spot in this was Woody Harrelson’s performance. While his backstory, motives, and character are a complete mystery, he does an excellent job in his performance. As stated before, Kate herself was very cool. One critique is that as the movie went on, they tried harder to force the fact that she was a badass, when they didn’t need to, which ruined her character a tad bit.
Overall, no exposition or backstories, an overwhelming amount of action, and a lack of importance in the story combine to make Kate extremely disappointing.