Kate is a Netflix action-thriller directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, with Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a contract killer poisoned at the start of her own last day and Woody Harrelson as the handler who made her.

Nicolas-Troyan comes out of visual effects, and the seam shows: every frame here is composed, lit and cut with real command, and almost none of that command is his own. The film moves like a greatest-hits reel of the modern revenge picture, and that — more than its body count — is the thing worth talking about.

The Story

The premise is a clock. Kate, the most disciplined assassin in her handler’s stable, is dosed with Polonium-204 during a job gone wrong and given less than a day before her body fails. She spends those hours tearing through the Tokyo underworld toward the man who poisoned her, dragging along Ani (Miku Martineau), the teenage daughter of one of her own kills. The countdown is the whole architecture: irreversible, externally imposed, mercifully simple.

The Film

Watch Kate as cinema in conversation with other cinema and the references stack up faster than the corpses. The neon-wet city and the dying-protagonist engine are Crank; the gun-fu choreography is John Wick; the woman-and-girl pairing against a male crime world is Gunpowder Milkshake by way of Leon; the yakuza-revenge frame and the saturated palette reach back to Kill Bill. Nicolas-Troyan stages all of it with genuine fluency — a one-take apartment brawl, a chase lit like an arcade, MIYAVI’s neon-guitar menace — but fluency is not authorship. No shot here argues a point of view the genre hasn’t already made for it.

His effects background shows in the best and the worst way. The action has weight and legibility — you always know where bodies are in space, rarer than it should be — yet the Tokyo around them is a backlit postcard, the city as Hollywood films it, all signage and no street. The picture admires Japanese iconography without ever growing curious about it, and that incuriosity is finally what separates a craftsman from an author.

Performances

Mary Elizabeth Winstead is the reason to stay. She plays Kate with a worn-down physicality — bruised, nauseous, running on borrowed time — that hands the choreography something the script withholds: stakes you feel in the body. Miku Martineau’s Ani supplies the only real warmth, and the prickly, reluctant bond between them is the one note in the film that isn’t quoted from somewhere else. Woody Harrelson does relaxed, avuncular menace in his sleep; Tadanobu Asano and Jun Kunimura lend the underworld a gravity the writing hasn’t earned.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Kate (2021), the Netflix action-thriller — Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Kate (2021). Netflix.

Our Verdict

Kate is a beautifully built machine that runs on other people’s fuel. It delivers precisely what an action-thriller promises — clean, brutal, propulsive set pieces and a lead who commits — and almost nothing it hasn’t borrowed whole. As craft it nears excellence; as cinema, weighed for what it adds rather than what it copies, it sits lower. Worth a Friday night, and gone by Saturday.

Cast & Crew

Director: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan. Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Miku Martineau, Woody Harrelson, Tadanobu Asano, Jun Kunimura, MIYAVI, Michiel Huisman, Mari Yamamoto. Genre: action thriller. Runtime: 106 minutes.