 My wife woke up at four in the morning because she heard the sounds of me crying at the edge of the bed. I was just sitting there, keeled over. She put a hand on my shoulder and said, sweetie, what is it? What's wrong? I acknowledged the hand touch out of the corner of my eye and shrugged it away. I was still upset. Nothing. You wouldn't understand. She touched the side of my chin and turned it towards her and said, try me. I flicked a speck of the salty discharge coming from my eye and said, you know what, Lindsay? I'm just so sick and tired of there being no strong female leads on Netflix. When are we gonna get a film? When a 90 pound woman fights an entire fleet of bad guys? I'm so sick of all these male driven movies. I want a woman doing it. And no, I'm not talking about jolt or gunpowder milkshake or atomic blonde or the other 45 movies that have come out in the last two years alone. No, I want something else that's exactly the same as those. She put her finger to my lips and said, she grabbed the controller turned on the TV and greeting me on the Netflix app right on the homepage was a film called Kate and I said, is this it? Is this the one? And she just nodded and smiled. She laid back down on her pillow, shut her eyes, drifted off into a peaceful slumber, thinking all the while as she always does, why the hell am I still married to this jackass? Let's talk about Kate. These movies are a dime a dozen, right? Well, so is a guy like me reviewing films on YouTube. I was still willing to give it a chance and I expect you will do the same by subscribing right now to this channel and doing me that same service. Kate stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a character named Vanessa. I'm sorry, Kate. Why would they go there? Joining her is Woody Harrelson as Varric, her instructor, her mentor, her dad, her mom, her coach, her everything really. He picked her up when she was just a youngling trained her how to be an assassin. Where have I heard this story before? Where's this plot come from? Besides literally every movie that's been coming out lately. Here's the deal though. And this is going to blow your drawers right off your penis. I actually liked Kate. I didn't love it. It's generic as all hell. It does the same formulate crap you've seen a million times, including the twist reveal in the final act that everyone sees coming right away. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is a beast in this though. She sells the performance just like John Wick himself, Keanu Reeves does. The action is of course very wickish as well. A lot of knife stabby stuff, a lot of gun food going on, a lot of people getting flipped. There's a ton of action in this. Choreography-wise it's solid, if not a little too slow. I am believing Mary Elizabeth Winstead in this role. Far more than these other skinny bitches I've been seeing lately. She's very physical too. I just think they needed to speed things up a tiny bit. There's a lot of instances where things are almost in slow motion, kind of like you can tell they're going through their choreographed motions. The first half of Kate is actually really strong. It's pretty fantastic. And it's not until the hour mark, the 45 minute mark where things really start to slow down and it becomes a little bit of a chore to finish. Mostly because you know exactly where the story's going. We have our standard, you know, girl raised to be an assassin. She's the best of the best, sort of a thing. Until she unfortunately lets her guard down and is poisoned. There's poison running through her system at a rapid pace, giving her only 24 hours to live, which is a fantastic song. And essentially the plot of every other Jason Statham movie, from Transporter 3 to Crank 1 and 2. It follows that playbook, things move quick. She doesn't have time for a lot of questions. She's killing people left and right. It's rated R for sure, but not for the swearing. I don't think I really noticed any swearing in it. A lot of violence though, and there's a couple of those John Wickish kills where you see the knife like go through the mouth and out the eye. Things that make you flinch for a second, or you know, when they do the shot where they're like holding on and you're flinching with the character like, no they're not gonna do it, are they? Oh yeah they are! We have the neon few city streets of Japan. So the cinematography's really good here actually. I really dug it. And the director's not afraid thankfully to do a couple creative camera shots. We get some of the longer ones where the camera starts out way back and we zoom in on the character, and then we move around them and up the shaft of a gun, and you're thinking, how did they shoot this? That was good. Usually I don't think that in a Netflix movie. I know exactly how they're done, and that's usually why they're awful. After a string of these pathetic attempts at the action hero genre, Kate gets it right. And that's because Mary Elizabeth Winstead's all in. It's because the director's not afraid to do a couple creative things. It's because the choreography's solid. The visuals are interesting. We got some cool music throughout. The Yakuza gang is a good foil for our hero. And then there's Ani, the young girl who's parentless, much like Kate was growing up. So there's a little bit of bonding there. She feels like she needs to protect this girl. And the girl thankfully isn't annoying. She's actually really good in this. I liked their dynamic together. I liked the whole protector angle. And it adds an interesting layer to the hero scenes, because not only does Kate have to worry about herself, but also protecting that girl. The movie's very fresh on Netflix as of this review, so you might not have seen it yet. If you have though, please let me know in the comments below. Like the video if you had a good time, and make sure to subscribe if you haven't. And I hope to see you around.