In one of the ‘it’ moments from Die Hard 4 (2007), widely hailed as a return to form for the Bruce Willis-led Die Hard franchise, Mary Elizabeth Winstead (playing Lucy McClane, the cop-protagonist John McClane’s daughter), when handed the phone by her kidnapper, tells her father, “Now there are only four of them left.” Now, 14 years later, in the Netflix film Kate (released on September 10), Winstead is playing her own version of McClane — a gun-toting, wisecracking badass who unwittingly finds herself protecting a young, doomed life.
Same trajectories
Directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, Kate is a lively but wildly uneven version of the ‘white mobster in yakuza-land’ trope (a notable example of this is the 2018 Jared Leto-starrer The Outsider ). The plot is simple and fairly linear: Kate’s handler Varrick (Woody Harrelson) tasks her with assassinating a yakuza (an international crime syndicate based in Japan) member. Kate is forced to take down the target while his young daughter is next to him. This breaks her personal code (‘don’t you love it when assassins are by the book?’), causing her to seek retirement. However, when a one-night stand with a handsome stranger (Michiel Huisman from Game of Thrones ) ends with Kate being fatally poisoned with polonium (a radioactive element), she must hunt down and punish the guilty during her last 24 hours — while also protecting Ani (Miku Martineau), the daughter of the man she killed, and niece of the yakuza boss Kizimi (Jun Kunimura).
Kate is a good example of the fine line between being influenced by existing movies and being derivative of them. The writers go all in while ‘announcing’ their inspirations via onscreen allusion, but they overshoot the mark while doing so. Kate’s characterisation is heavily derivative of Luc Besson’s many female assassins. The film’s biggest and most impressive fight scene — between Kate and a zillion yakuza enforcers — is well-shot and decently choreographed, but also painfully reminiscent of the ‘Crazy 88’ fight scene from Kill Bill Vol. 1 (which itself was an amalgam of various Bruce Lee sequences; the yellow jumpsuit worn by Uma Thurman was a tribute to Lee).
The equation between Kate and Varrick starts off as a student-teacher relationship, which blossoms into a friendship based on mutual respect, and later deteriorates because of Varrick’s treachery and ambition. The thing is, exactly the same trajectory is followed by not one but two other female assassin movies in 2021 — the Kate Beckinsale movie Jolt and the star-studded Gunpowder Milkshake (also a Netflix movie) featuring Karen Gillan, Michelle Yeoh, Lena Headey and others. In Jolt , the erring mentor is played by Stanley Tucci while Gunpowder Milkshake sees Paul Giamatti playing a similar role.
Middling set pieces
Hollywood is slowly realising that Asian martial arts movies offer something that their own blockbusters do not — Kill Bill remains a strong, early reminder of this. Marvel’s Shang-Chi was a step towards making inroads into that market. But disappointingly, Hollywood movies set in Asia still appear to follow tropes that have been done to death — apart from the ones pointed out earlier, there’s also the eternal ‘insider/ outsider’ dilemma. Asian characters ‘betray’ their own friends and family, while white characters ‘prove their loyalty’ en route to earning ‘insider’ status. Kizimi, for instance, is betrayed by those close to him who go over to Varrick’s side.
There are other, more effective narrative models that these films should have looked at instead. The Cinemax series Warrior (available on Hotstar in India), for example, deals with questions of origin and belonging in a smart, multi-dimensional way without resorting to clichés. The now-cancelled Into the Badlands featured spectacular ‘wire fu’ fight choreography, like the best Hong Kong blockbusters, and also featured an intriguing, post-apocalyptic world as setting, where guns are extinct and swordplay is back in vogue.
Kate leaves the viewer with a middling gallery of action set pieces and not much else. It’s a shame because Winstead makes for a hell of a McClane-style badass, and with a better script, this could have led to a franchise with her character. Maybe Marvel can wave its magic wand and offer her a role in the next Shang-Chi film; it’d be a shame to waste that kung fu training.
Aditya Mani Jha is a writer and journalist working on his first book of non-fiction.
