She has just enough time to get her “24 hours to live” diagnosis, make a plan and start her escape before the first J-cops show up. She’s an assassin captured by the cops and hospitalized after wrecking that garishly painted and lit tuner/hoonigan getaway car. In one glorious moment, after Kate has botched an assignment because she’s got the shakes from the Putin-approved poison somebody slipped her, she makes her escape in the most conspicuous getaway car this side of the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile. We see Noh theater performed (to no audience), yakuza and geishas and J-pop and lurid blacklit nightclubs and neon-drenched streets and a tall, willowy American hit-woman who doesn’t stand out. Visual effects artist turned director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan - he did VFX for “Snow White and the Huntsman” and got to direct the “Huntsman” sequel nobody saw - and screentypist Umair Aleem (“The Extraction”) make the most of the movie’s most arresting element, its Japanese setting. His jokes - “picket fences…suburbs” are older than he is.Īnd it’s all downhill from that opening scene. She wants “a life, a real regular life.” She wants to “finish the job, and then I’m out.” Her handler, the guy who “groomed” her for this work ( Woody Harrelson), has his cliches memorized - “Not your first rodeo…collateral damage” yadda yadda yadda. The lady assassin (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has “one simple rule, no kids.” We know what the hack screenwriter used for his mashup - “D.O.A./Crank” meets “The Professional.” We know the rancid cheese dialogue by heart before anybody utters a word of it. We know where it’s going the instant it starts. “Kate” is the most laughably predictable thriller since the silent film era.
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