Mary Elizabeth Winstead is a ruthless assassin on a Tokyo-set hunt for revenge in Kate trailer
Winstead stars as the assassin on a mission in the film set to hit Netflix on September 10
Film News Kate
Straight out of playing The Huntress in Birds Of Prey, Mary Elizabeth Winstead is back to kick ass and take names in Netflix’s new action feature Kate. The first trailer for the film features Winstead as a determined assassin on a final mission for revenge as the clock runs out.
After blowing an assignment, assassin Kate falls into the hands of the Yakuza organization. Waking up only to discover she’s been poisoned, the ruthless criminal operative has less than 24 hours to exact revenge on her enemies. In the process, she forms an unexpected bond with the fearless daughter of one of her past victims. Woody Harrelson appears as Kate’s confidant and support system, with Tadanobu Asano, Miyavi, Michiel Huisman, Miku Martineau, and Jun Kunimura also starring in the revenge quest.
Channeling John Wick with the fight scenes, adding a Crank-esque storyline, and with Winstead evoking the demeanor of Ripley in Alien, Netflix offers a potentially knockout action movie. Director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan applauds Winstead’s “visceral and extremely raw aspect” action performances, as she did all her own stunts.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Nicolas-Troyan describes the action film as his “love letter” to Japan. Though it feels a little incongruous to have a white woman lead this “love letter” by wailing on Japanese people for the majority of the film, Nicolas-Troyan says that highlighting many cherished aspects of Japanese culture was extremely important to him.
“The movie is stuffed with Japanese cultural references: the Lawson convenience stores, the vending machines, the pop culture (with the classic Galactic Wars TV show largely inspired by Star Wars), the anime manga culture (with Tokyo Ghoul) and the music,” he explains. “All the needle drops in the film are there to celebrate Japanese female artists of all genres: metal, pop, ballad, hip-hop, and just plain weird.”
Kate premieres on Netflix on September 10.
58 Comments
Crank + Yakuza + John Wick + Tokyo = This is my Jam, Baby.
Ahhh yes, more cookie cutter Netflix ‘C’ movies. Just what we need
That blood in the eye effect is gnarly in the best way.
I’m assuming the Crank storyline won’t include sex in public with Amy Smart this time.
Don’t be hasty . . .
Waking up only to discover she’s been poisoned, the ruthless criminal operative has less than 24 hours to exact revenge on her enemies.What an original concept for a film.
I wish MEW would kick my ass…
When I saw Snake Eyes, I was pleasantly surprised by how relatively well they handled setting their movie in Japan. Mostly Japanese actors playing Japanese characters, recognizable but not gratuitous Japanese urban locales (The giant privately owned castle seemingly set near Tokyo was silly, but fine). It made me think maybe we’d passed into an era where American fetishization of Japan had subdued somewhat.Luckily we have this movie coming on its heels, to disabuse me by celebrating the finer parts of Japanese pop culture, like convenience stores and vending machines. My movie set in America is going to have similar touchstones: At one point, the main character will pass a Kroger, and wear a trucker hat with Bart Simpson on it.
Ok.
A while back I saw a Bollywood movie that was set in Chicago. Towards the end there was a car chase that ended at a giant cliff with a waterfall and Hoover-sized Dam. We were all, “Oh yes, the Great Cliffs of Naperville, great place for a picnic.”
And who can forget Jackie Chan’s Rumble in the Bronx, where fists flew against the glorious backdrop of the Bronx mountain range.
I don’t think this proves a single thing about anything, but I just have to point out how The Mummy Returns tries to suggest that every single landmark in London is apparently within walking distance of each other.
Harping on Chicago, but stuff set in this city does that all the time. Like, Shameless had William H. Macy walk out of a South Side hospital and he was suddenly at the North Shore (which would be a minimum two hour walk in the opposite direction of where he lived.) Or that Netflix Dave Bautista kiddie-spy movie that’s set in Wicker Park, but is apparently a quick walk to Promentory Point (which is a solid half hour by car, or hour by train).
I mean, I get it, the location scouts are looking for places that have the skyline in the background so they can say SEE!! We’re on LOCATION!!!! But it’s still jarring for people who live here.
You can’t show people using effective public transportation since that may entice kids to commit a communism.
I liked Birds of Prey and she was the best thing out of the whole movie to me. This looks really good.
Nicolas-Troyan says that highlighting many cherished aspects of Japanese culture was extremely important to him.Ok, just talking about the trailer here. Nicolas-Troyan had to point that out, because the trailer made no effort to in doing that. In terms in highlighting the bad guys in another country…it came off as generic. You can swap them out for Mexican mafia, Russian mob, The triads….oh wait, no, can’t have foreign movies where the Chinese are the central antagonists. But I did enjoy the trailer for what it was.It just looks like another another actor/actress trying to get their John Wick in. Now I’m all for that, because it can be fun. But this trailer reminded me of similar trailers of movies led by badass women that were either disappointing or just disappeared in obscurity. Atomic Blonde, Anna, Peppermint, and Ava. I can’t include Jolt until I actually watch it. But more power to Kate if it succeeds.But the director has to clear that browser history. Netflix wasn’t going to let him celebrate all the female artists in the “just plain weird” category.
All those movies are good. Jolt is the far opposite of good. Like worse than bad. Return he and tell me what you think.
If you were disappointed by Atomic Blonde, I don’t even know what to say to you other than “How?!”
If I had the movie-making skills (and budget) when I was 15 years old, Atomic Blonde is exactly the movie I would have made. It’s absolutely glorious!
More power to those who liked it. The trailers made me believe it was gonna be one kind of movie, but the final product for me was nothing special.
Well, it dragged on and became a convoluted mess with it’s plot twists and execution of storytelling. It’s action scenes were fine but few and far in between. It wasn’t successful enough to capitalize John Wick numbers as the trailers tried to advertise the movie out to be, or start a new franschise. And finally, to each their own. Glad you liked it, I thought it was meh.
It was a nostalgia-heavy Cold War Spy Thriller set in the very last days of the aforementioned cold war. Given the next 12 years were going to be pretty dead as far as storytelling goes on the espionage front, I don’t think it was ever intended as a franchise starter.
It was directed by David Leitch who also helped in making the first John Wick movie. Now he did the smart thing by creating a movie that can stand alone with no cliffhanger. However, not only did he wanted to make a sequel based on the success of Atomic Blonde, but also wants to have her cross over into John Wick. It made a 100 million dollars pretty much off of a 30 million budget. So, financially it did well enough to be successful. But not enough for studios in a hurry wanting to make sequels. There apparently will be a sequel as a netflix movie. But it’s going on near five years since Atomic Blonde was first released. Fans have mixed feelings of it including me. I see the nostalgia. And whatever action it had was cool. But the storytelling, the script, the plot (especially at the end) was just poorly executed and too convoluted in my opinion. It’s trailer made it look like it would be a completely different movie than what we got.
You can add ‘Gunpowder Milkshake’ which Netflix also just put out. Maybe it’s just poor timing, but it has a similar storyline right down to the little girl. Though I’m sure it’s tone and style will be different, I’ll probably still enjoy it.
You know, in all of my many years watching action movies, I’ve yet to see a protagonist actually stop for a moment, pull out a notepad, and scribble down the name of the henchman that they’re about to pummel.
She’s going to murder Tokyo with her zubaz gun!
…adding a Crank-esque storyline,
Crank borrows its storyline from the classic movie D.O.A (1949),which was remade in 1988.
Does it though? To me the singular thing about the Crank 1/2 plot is that it provided a reason for the movie to never slow down or let up on the action – not that the guy is basically dead from the beginning.
The films are tonally different, but Crank is a minor tweak on the D.O.A. premise: the protagonist must complete a mission while dealing with a deteriorating (dying) body.
I guess I can see that – though I’d say that “minor tweak” makes a huge difference, and is what makes Crank somewhat revolutionary in my opinion.Either way I’m now interested in checking out D.O.A., so thanks for pointing out the connection.
I’m not suggesting that Crank’s variation on D.O.A.’s premise isn’t clever and entertaining: I really enjoyed the first one and even thought the sequel was ok. And most movies build on established tropes. West Side Story is variation on Romeo and Juliet, and the “tweaks” are profound and important. What I’m claiming is that these variants are built on established scaffolding, scaffolding that can be traced to specific source material. In fact Kate is following D.O.A’s scaffolding more closely than Crank is, in that the protagonist doesn’t know who poisoned her, where Jason Statham knew exactly who injected him with a drug that is killing him.
FWIW I think it’s more a “they share the same basic underlying trope” thing than a “they’re essentially remakes / the same movie” thing.
The premise reminds me of Cyberpunk 2077. Where you have a limited time to do your job and every once in a while you get headaches.
The car scenes look really wonky, like a mix of FX from early F&F and the Wachowskis Speed Racer film. The other stuff seemed well executed, MEW was solid in Birds of Prey and has a very convincing physicality.If she kicks this much ass while poisoned, she must _really_ be hell on wheels when she’s at 100% 😀
Depends what the poison is. The earliest of the Olympic athletes had some among them who believed that strychnine boosted athletic performance.
I love this. There are many actors who have tried action roles, but Winstead is not only good and credible at the physicality, she has an expressiveness that brings the character to life in the midst of all the violence. I wish the filmmakers of Harley Quinn had given her character more to do, and when some streamer makes the inevitable umpteenth reboot of the Die Hard franchise, this makes a strong case that Winstead’s Lucy McClane should be at the center of it.
So, odds on Woody’s character doing a heel turn and turning out to have set her up?
100%
I haven’t watched Birds of Prey, but Winstead’s physicality was the best thing I got out of Gemini Man, so I’m all for this.Neon is the color of everything for action now, huh? Well, better than lens flare.Re: the Japanese backdrop, well, it looks like there’s a teamup? And I await the reassessment of Lost in Translation with this updated cultural lens. I’ve always thought that was a beautiful movie that I hated for it’s other/exoticism of the Orient. Probably that’d be recognized if it came out now but there you go.PS: It’d be a boring movie, but people should use right away poisons instead of 24-hour poisons if they want to kill people.
“but people should use right away poisons instead of 24-hour poisons”It does seem like most supervillains have this blind spot. Instead of just shooting them in the head Outside the innermost secret headquarters, captured enemy agents are constantly being brought through Security to be killed on a “delay” by some wind-up mechanism or hungry animals.
I like just about everybody in BoP, but MEW is the MVP.
Been meaning to check it out. I watched Cathy Yan’s first movie, Dead Pigs, and it’s a fun dark comedy and interesting for it’s the tightrope it walks–political and bleak but also restrained, being filmed in China and all.
It helps that her character is the one closest to her comic book counterpart. Many said she was underused in BoP, but I thought what we did see captured the Huntess perfectly, and I liked how the movie built a fun sense of mystery around her while then later hilariously puncturing it. We definitely need to see more of her and Jurnee Smollet-Bell’s Black Canary, hopefully in an HBO series.
Man, I love that movie.
Lost in Translation is a little more nuanced case, I think – it’s from the perspective of two characters who don’t know much about Japan, and conveying that feeling of “this is a strange place with strange people and I have no idea what’s going on” is important to making the film work. In theory you could let the audience understand what the characters don’t, but I’m not sure that would make for a better film.
I don’t know that is so nuanced, though—I think the culture and events to be translated as selected shows the film’s preferences beyond the characters. It’s been a long time, but I’ve always been struck by what’s funny and what’s not. It’s underratedly funny, I think, but also has mean streak in it’s humor. The butt of the joke isn’t the lost people, it’s the Japanese, or the ditzy actress, or the expatriate lounge singer. For what it’s worth, I’m Asian, so maybe I’m supposed to feel for tall Bill Murray among the Lilliputians, but I don’t. And from what I remember a sudden gauzy light around hip young kids and traditional kimono women walking by—again, a very selective selection. By the time it was an unrecorded whispering I was out of goodwill, so that ending hit like a lack of nerve rather than romantic mystery.And maybe this is confirmation bias, but Coppola making movies where she removes the Latina (Bling Ring) or Black people during the Civil War (the Beguiling) because racism is too complicated—shrugging away the inopportune just seems to be her mode.
A highly stylized assassin in Tokyo. Why do I feel like I’ve seen that 20 times?
“Though it feels a little incongruous to have a white woman lead this “love letter” by wailing on Japanese people for the majority of the film . . .”It’s whaling (striking or hitting vigorously), not wailing (lamenting, making a mournful cry). That’s a common mistake.
Whaling is a touchy subject when you’re discussing the Japanese
What he should’ve said is “It’s scientifically researching”.
“Atomic Brunette”? I wonder what the hurricanrana count will be…
I do love how, after decades of being all, “drr, people won’t go see a woman lead in an action movie, drr” studio execs are suddenly in a race to make up for lost time and get all the women into “spy/assassin who has to do a thing” roles.
Though it feels a little incongruous to have a white woman lead this
“love letter” by wailing on Japanese people for the majority of the film
You see, a pimp’s love is very different from a square’s.
You could do worse than “Crank, but Mary Elizabeth Winstead” as a starting point.Of course, I’ve had a crush on her since Death Proof, so.
“It feels a little incongruous to have a white woman lead this “love letter” by wailing on Japanese people for the majority of the film”, i mean, how is this not the main focus of the article.
As an annoying list-maker (according to Melbourne’s ‘The Age’), I had 3 favourite actresses for ages (gedditt?): Julianne Moore, Judy Davis and Francis McDormand … Then Mary Elizabeth Winstead turned up in the grimy indie, ‘Faults’. She’s insanely relatable. Great actress.
For a moment, I read the headline as “Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is a ruthless assassin…” and I was severely disappointed, because I would have been SO DOWN for that.
Oh, great. Now there’s two Hollywood Mary Elizabeth’s I gotta keep track of now.
That was Band-Maid playing in the bar. They are freaking awesome!