![]() ![]() She just has to care about Ani-pay no attention to the mountains of corpses piled up behind her. Kate has to feel remorse, but not for slaughtering a bunch of yakuza. ![]() When left to her own devices, Martineau makes it work-the scenes in which Ani finds new clothes for Kate, and later, when she takes selfies with the two of them, are novel in a movie that otherwise takes itself pretty seriously-but the progression of the plot, which involves Varrick attempting to turn Ani against Kate with the knowledge that Kate is responsible for the violence brought down upon her family, makes it clear that Ani exists largely as just another plot device in Kate’s story. Martineau is charming, but there’s not that much of Ani outside of her relationship with Kate. As it turns out, Renji’s plan for ascension includes wiping out all of Kijima’s family, and Kate is too soft-hearted to let Ani just die. Usually, there is a two-year gap between Netflix movies unless the movies are filmed back to back. Though we first meet Ani as the daughter of the man we see Kate assassinating at the beginning of the movie, she ends up becoming Kate’s sidekick. Assuming that Kate 2 is ordered at Netflix, we could expect to see the movie sometime in 2023. The character of Ani (Miku Martineau), Kijima’s niece, appears to be similarly calculated to serve as a remedy. It Is Long Past Time to Retire the Oldest, Dumbest Debate in Literary History Who’s Really to Blame for Philadelphia’s Latest Faceplant? How Plausible Is Succession’s Election Nightmare? While the revenge thriller seems to want to be seen as a female John Wick, making it only the latest in a recent spate of neon-hued movies about female contract killers (the trailer touts that it’s from “a producer of” Atomic Blonde, and it arrives less than a couple of months after Gunpowder Milkshake), this bloody tourist trip through Japan is ultimately more like one of Kate’s fellow Netflix originals, the controversial and culturally insensitive Jared Leto yakuza flick The Outsider. Still, the apparent self-awareness is too little, too late, and doesn’t redeem what is fundamentally a xenophobic trope. In fairness, if the premise seems depressingly familiar (not to mention ill-timed after an eruption of anti-Asian violence), the filmmakers-director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan and writer Umair Aleem-appear to be aware of this: They supply Kate with a biracial sidekick, and a major twist late in the movie attempts to turn the formula on its head. At a glance, the movie, which sends Winstead’s titular assassin rampaging through Tokyo, seems like yet another film wherein a white American protagonist mows down nameless character after nameless character in a foreign country. When the trailer for Kate, a new Netflix film starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Woody Harrelson, was first released last month, some viewers expressed concern.
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