movie review of kate

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On the Netflix screen for “Kate,” the description says “this movie is Violent, Exciting.” That first adjective is quite accurate—this film is wall-to-wall carnage. I must respectfully disagree with that second adjective, however, unless you enjoy watching someone else play an uninvolving video game for almost two hours. If this type of thing turns you on, please have at it. There’s a cynical air to the lackluster proceedings, as if the filmmakers assume you’ll stumble across “Kate” and watch it simply because it’s there and you’re too lazy to scroll down the screen for something better. That appears to be Netflix’s rationale for their mid-budget actioners, and it can provide much satisfaction if there’s a good story welded to the set-pieces. But Umair Aleem ’s script is so paint-by-numbers familiar that it leaves you wishing you’d watched one of the better movies it’s ripping off. I believe Netflix also carries several of those.

After her superb and memorable turn in “Birds of Prey,” Mary Elizabeth Winstead is handed the reins of her own action movie. Winstead is not only a very credible agent of violence, she also provides interesting approaches to her scenes. There’s something off-kilter and unique about her, something you can’t quite put your finger on, yet you feel its presence. I find her compulsively watchable, which is why I found this dreck so aggravating. She’s clearly having fun here, but she deserves better than the warmed-over plot details every single female assassin movie must contain. The assassin is always a lone wolf, deserted by family before being adopted by a male authority figure who trains and mentors her before ultimately becoming some form of adversary she must deal with against her will.

Here, the male mentor is phoned in by Woody Harrelson . And I don’t mean that just figuratively—80% of his performance is literally on the phone. If you look closely into his eyes, you can see the ATM where he deposited the check from this movie. Harrison’s Varrick is the handler for Winstead’s titular character, the one person Kate trusts. When the film opens, she’s in Osaka, Japan on an assignment that predictably goes awry. Despite the rules against shooting people with children present, Kate takes a shot that takes out her target in front of his kid. Fast-forward to Kate’s “last mission,” where she’ll eventually team up with a rambunctious teenager named Ani (Miku Patricia Martineau). Guess what her connection is to that prior execution?

Before we get to Ani, Kate engages in rumpy-pumpy with a guy who fatally poisons her with something that will kill her in 24 hours. She’ll not only need to find out why she’s been murdered, but she’ll also need to avenge her own death. The only thing that keeps her going is hourly shots of adrenaline. So, we’ve got an injection of “D.O.A.” here (the hideous '80s remake, that is, not the original). In addition to the gruesome external wounds and scars Kate will endure battling countless adversaries, the poison is quickly rotting her from the inside out. Numerous scenes of barfing ensue, as well as some teeth falling out and blood pouring out of unwelcome places unprovoked. This adds a healthy dash of “The Fly” to the proceedings (the awesome '80s remake, that is, not the original).

I dug the body horror and how Winstead rolls with it. It gives Kate a physical vulnerability that wages war with the genre’s insistence that its protagonists are crack shots while their competition can’t hit the side of a barn. It’s when “Kate” tries for emotional vulnerability that it fails. Ani is kidnapped by Kate because she’s a relative of Kijima ( Jun Kunimura ), the man who may have ordered the poisonous hit. Flashbacks draw parallels between Ani and her kidnapper, and after it appears Ani’s family wants to kill her, Kate drags her along on her quest. Martineau does her best playing a rebellious teenager whose tough exterior masks a scared kid, but the script gives the two actors the barest minimum of bonds to play. It’s far more superficial than moving.

Ani keeps referring to Kate as “a Terminator,” but this movie owes a lot more to Ah-nuld’s '80 classic, “Commando,” especially when Kate has to save her ward from the bad guys. Mark Lester handled Schwarzenegger mowing down an entire military with a much lighter and more entertaining touch than director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan does here. He depicts violence in joyless and monotonous fashion. There are only so many ways bullets can enter heads and torsos, and while I enjoy the majority of those ways, it gets real tired real fast here.

“Kate” also wants to be as cool as the Asian action movies it seeks to emulate with a White lead, but the end result fetishizes Asian culture and Japan with the embarrassing fervor of a horny dog humping a leg. The overdone effect is too hilarious and embarrassing to be offensive, but it is cringe-inducing. A major death scene is highlighted by a gigantic, smiling and waving neon kitty cat. J-Pop blares on the soundtrack while Kate strolls toward the camera flanked by Yakuza hitmen. There’s even a gay adversary who is introduced getting a fish pedicure before unveiling a back covered in letter tattoos. The camera ogles him like he’s some exotic object before he preens and sways while battling Kate. He quickly meets one of the most gruesome demises offered up as red meat to a bloodthirsty audience, which is a shame as he’s more interesting than any of the main villains. In a film as dully derivative as this, I’ll take my pleasures where I can.

On Netflix today.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

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Kate (2021)

Rated R for strong bloody violence and language throughout.

106 minutes

Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Kate

Miku Martineau as Ani

Woody Harrelson as Varrick

Tadanobu Asano as Renji

Michiel Huisman as Stephen

Jun Kunimura as Kjima

Miyavi as Jojima

Amelia Crouch as Teen Kate

Ava Caryofyllis as Child Kate

• Cedric Nicolas-Troyan
• Umair Aleem

Cinematographer

• Lyle Vincent
• Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir
• Sandra Montiel
• Nathan Barr

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‘Kate’ Review: A Dying Assassin Fills Her Bucket List With Blood

Mary Elizabeth Winstead slashes through Tokyo in a kooky yet predictable vengeance flick

By Amy Nicholson

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“You’re a Terminator,” Tokyo teen Ani (Miku Patricia Martineau) gapes to Kate ( Mary Elizabeth Winstead ) after witnessing the bloodshed her kidnapper has brought down on two dozen yakuza now lying shot, stabbed, sizzled on a yakitori grill and very, very dead. Kate, the titular antihero of director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan ’s vicious vengeance flick, is a grown-up child assassin trained by her mentor (Woody Harrelson) in the art of death, a fate so common among on-screen orphans that their support group could fill a church basement. Yes, she can rack up quite the Schwarzenegger-esque kill count. But Kate’s Terminator resemblance also includes her left eye’s red and distended pupil, evidence of the polonium poisoning that will kill her in 24 hours. Other symptoms of this gimmick include blistered skin, pounding eardrums, wobbly knees and an urgency to take an entire gangster clan along with her to the grave. There is no cure. There is only carnage — and to his credit, Nicolas-Troyan (“The Huntsman: Winter’s War”) keeps the hits coming.

Kate is introduced on the most traumatic day of her job. She pulls up to an assignment in a dessert van — an unnecessarily cutesy touch — and finds she’s expected to snipe her target in front of his daughter, Ani. This goes against her only rule. But she pulls the trigger anyway and watches in slow-motion horror as the man’s blood spatters the girl’s face and coat, a carnation pink that recalls the moment Jackie O. went from style icon to tragic victim.

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It’s a strong opening for a breed of action spectacle where audiences can map out the twists like they’ve been handed a Thomas Guide. The script by Umair Aleem is little more than a framework for the only two elements that matter: the fight choreography — quite good, courtesy of “John Wick’s” Jonathan Eusebio — and the wavelength of the star, which has come to mean everything. Often, a female actor in these grindhouse actioners adopts a stoic dreariness meant to pass for a gives-as-good-as-she-gets empowerment, as if anything so fanciful as a personality is a sign of weakness.

Winstead, however, chooses to play Kate as a human being — not some femmebot executioner dressed in latex or pigtails. She wears hoodies and, only somewhat cloyingly, a smiley face shirt purchased from a vending machine when her gear gets covered in gore. There’s life in her eyes and exhaustion in her gait. Winstead makes you believe, however improbably, that if a woman like Kate actually existed outside a screenwriter’s imagination, she wouldn’t be far off from this portrayal: isolated, mule-headed and ready for a change. But just as Kate decides to shake up her life, a handsome stranger slips a radioactive toxin into her wine glass and she’s forced back into making silencers out of convenience store flashlights and stabbing people through their soft palate.

Winstead’s naturalistic performance butts heads with the film’s exaggerated style. Nicolas-Troyan’s Tokyo is a fantasy land. The first aerial shot of the city is of Tokyo Tower, an Eiffel Tower clone seemingly designed to disorient tourists. This Tokyo is all goofball caricatures. Yakuza steam themselves like dumplings. J-pop singers dance in French maid outfits. Cars are outlined in neon like they sped out of Mario Kart. A penthouse has its very own bucket of suckerfish that nibble on a gangster moll’s pedicure, a distracting home-decor touch that leaves one nervous it could get kicked over on the way to the fridge for a midnight snack. When the regal Japanese star Jun Kunimura (“Kill Bill”), here playing the heavyweight boss at the center of the havoc, takes a swipe at Westerners who “gorge on cultures they don’t understand,” the line sounds more pointed than Nicolas-Troyan might have intended.

Lyle Vincent’s cinematography leans into the cartoon aesthetics. The standout action sequence takes place at an underworld social club where all the gangsters wear crisp black suits and glower in front of white rice-paper walls that double as panels in a comic book. The monochrome setting is an invitation for Kate to add a splash of color thanks to some artistic throat punctures, and the camera happily chases after her, whether she’s bursting through flimsy doors, leaping up fire escapes or in one nifty moment, bracing herself one story up in a narrow alley.

The body count becomes numbing. Yet Winstead’s Kate appears to weather the most damage. She’s no Teflon superhero, especially once the polonium kicks in and the soundtrack transitions from energetic Japanese pop to heavy taiga drums that remind us that Kate’s pulse is slowing down. Soon after, her path re-intersects with that of Ani, the traumatized teen from the opening, who’s now become visibly punk. The film tries to make the audience care about Kate’s possible redemption. More interesting, however, is the script’s hint that the teen is already a demi-sociopath. A bit when Ani takes a selfie with Kate’s unconscious body might have had more twisted humor on the page, but Martineau in her feature debut does well with a role that’s even more ludicrous than that of the leading lady.

It’s beyond obvious where this is going, that all this talk of family will sour into betrayal and eventually, a climax that postures as an emotional revelation. And it’s somewhat obvious to Nicolas-Troyan that the audience doesn’t really care. He just has to shoot enough stylish battles to get his film to the end credits, a quest for completion Kate herself would understand. “I’m dying,” she gasps. “I have to finish something .”

Reviewed online, Los Angeles, Sept. 1, 2021. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 106 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix presentation of an Eightyseven North Prods., Clubhouse Pictures production. Producers: David Leitch, Kelly McCormick, Patrick Newall, Bryan Unkeless. Co-producers: Michael Selby, Anthony J. Vorhies.
• Crew: Director: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan. Screenplay: Umair Aleem. Camera: Lyle Vincent. Editors: Sandra Montiel, Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir. Music: Nathan Barr.
• With: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Woody Harrelson, Miku Patricia Martineau, Jun Kunimura

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Mary elizabeth winstead in netflix’s ‘kate’: film review.

The action drama revolves around an elite assassin who's left with one day to live after being poisoned, and decides to spend her final hours hunting down the person who wants her dead.

By Angie Han

Television Critic

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Ostensibly, Netflix’s Kate is a brand-new movie based on an original concept. It’s not a remake or a reboot or an extension of a franchise; it’s not based on real events nor adapted from existing source materials.

But you’ve seen Kate before in other movies, which a cynic might suspect is exactly the idea: It feels like a title cooked up by the Netflix algorithm solely for the purpose of populating a Because You Watched row. (It is actually directed by a human, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan.) It’s a little bit Extraction , a little bit Gunpowder Milkshake . Its Japanophile aesthetic aims for the grit of Blade Runner but falls closer to the empty gloss of Ghost in the Shell . Even the title character feels like an extension of star Mary Elizabeth Winstead ‘s other vengeful assassin character from Birds of Prey .

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Release date: Friday, Sept. 10

Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Miku Martineau, Woody Harrelson

Director: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan

Screenwriter: Umair Aleem

All these familiar elements come together to form a movie that’s fitfully entertaining. If its bloody fistfights feel sluggish in comparison to the balletic grace of John Wick , well, there are worse action movies to crib from than John Wick . If its car chase feels too obviously CG even by the standards of a Fast & Furious movie, well, the vrooms and screeches still scratch a certain lizard-brain itch. But Kate wears its influences like borrowed clothes, never quite managing to develop a style or voice that feels wholly its own.

Umair Aleem’s script is so predictable that it’s possible to map out the entire final act based on the first two minutes of the movie and the plot synopsis. The spoiler-free version is this: Kate is an elite American assassin operating in Tokyo, who wakes up after a botched job to discover she’s been poisoned. She has roughly one day left to live, which she chooses to spend hunting down and enacting revenge on her killers — with unexpected assistance in the form of Ani (Miku Martineau), the teen daughter of one of Kate’s recent targets. (No points for guessing whether they’ll form an unconvincing emotional bond over their respective tragic backstories.)

Winstead’s no-nonsense aura serves her well as Kate, a strong, silent type whose only concession to whimsy is an obsession with a particular brand of soft drink. And she certainly looks the part of the badass heroine, at least in slo-mo. A late scene in which she struts into a lobby, sneering behind enormous sunglasses, a dangling cigarette and layers upon layers of blood and bruises, feels like ideal GIF fodder. But she’s handily upstaged the moment a character with an actual personality shows up — Jojima, a yakuza hitman played with rock star élan by real-life rock star Miyavi. First introduced in a silk Versace robe enjoying an at-home fish pedicure, Jojima makes Kate feel, for a moment, exactly as stylish and silly as it should be.

Alas, Jojima doesn’t stick around long. Without him, Kate is largely an endless onslaught of mostly interchangeable yakuza goons hurtling through stereotypically Japanese settings: a bathhouse, a kabuki performance, an outdoor market awash in neon. When a Japanese character complains that Westerners “gorge on cultures they don’t understand,” it’s hard not to wonder what movie he thinks he’s in, seeing as Kate ends up being yet another movie that sees the country as little more than an exotic backdrop for its white characters. (Even Ani, a local, is set apart from her Japanese crime family by virtue of being half-white.)

But such superficiality is par for the course for Kate . If the film has a defining moment, it’s not any of the cool parts where Kate shoots bad guys, or the sentimental parts where she’s bonding with her young charge, or the wannabe-meaningful parts where she’s receiving wisdom from an old Japanese gangster. (“Death is a beginning,” he remarks sagely.) It’s the instant when she pauses in the middle of an urgent mission to cut her own hair over a bathroom sink.

Kate’s not trying to disguise herself. Her hair’s not in the way. She’s not especially vain, as far as we know, and she’s definitely short on time. She doesn’t even look that different afterward. Nevertheless, she gives herself a trim, and fluffs it while studying herself in the mirror, because the self-administered haircut is cinematic shorthand for a woman taking charge of her own life, and that’s what Kate hopes to convey Kate is doing — never mind that the scene makes no sense in context. It’s the movie equivalent of copying someone else’s homework and forgetting to change the name on top. The film’s mimicry might be deft enough to pass muster here and there. But it doesn’t take an eagle eye to notice that Kate ‘s got few ideas of its own.

Full credits

Distributor: Netflix Production company: 87North Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Tadanobu Asano, Miyavi, Michiel Huisman, Miku Martineau, Jun Kunimura, Woody Harrelson Director: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan Screenwriter: Umair Aleem Producers: Bryan Unkeless, Kelly McCormick, Patrick Newall Executive producers: David Leitch, Scott Morgan Director of photography: Lyle Vincent Production designer: Dominic Watkins Costume designer: Audrey Fisher Editor: Sandra Montiel, Elisabet Ronaldsdóttir Music: Nathan Barr Casting director: Jenny Jue Stunt coordinator: Jonathan Eusebio VFX supervisor: Audrey Fisher

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Kate review – stylish Netflix assassin thriller just about does the job

Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays a killer with 24 hours to live in a familiarly plotted yet diverting enough Japan-set thriller

T here’s nothing particularly inventive about the Netflix action thriller Kate – from the director of The Huntsman: Winter’s War, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan – the streamer’s umpteenth bullets over brains offering this year, but there’s also nothing particularly heinous in its execution, a to-the-point two-hour slab of pulp that slickly glides above a very low bar. The platform’s flatly directed, often incompetently choreographed churn of action content has meant that a sudden whiff of style and a glimpse of an actual location suddenly jolts one from a drift of sleep to a mild amount of attention.

That’s just about the amount that this deserves, a serviceable Friday night choice that gets the job done just fine, enough to turn it into a hit for the streamer (the far less convincing Jason Momoa actioner Sweet Girl skirted around their top 10 for much longer than deserved) but not quite enough to insist that anyone actually bothers to make time for it, unless drunk or out of all other options. It’s cobbled together from so many familiar ingredients that I was surprised to find out that an actual human (Umair Aleem) wrote it rather than some sort of computer and even viewers with a vague knowledge of the assassin subgenre will feel a suffocating sense of deja vu from the cold open onwards.

It’s Osaka and trained killer Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is prepping for a job accompanied by her boss, mentor and father figure Varrick (Woody Harrelson). But as her mark gets into view, she sees that his daughter is by his side, her “no kids” rule stopping her from making a clean shot. She’s urged to pull the trigger, though, and 10 months later, finds herself still quietly haunted by what she did. It’s time to quit but on her last job, Kate is given irreversible radiation poisoning and has just 24 hours to figure out who wants her dead and why.

The quest reunites her with the girl she orphaned (because of course) which lumbers the film with an age-old trope of the cold-blooded killer who warms around the presence of a child. It’s a particularly frustrating way used by mostly male screenwriters to humanise female killers, also used recently in Netflix’s other neon-hued assassin film of the summer Gunpowder Milkshake , as if strong-willed women need to be reminded of their maternal instincts. Kate is told that she is less a person and more of an instrument and despite Winstead trying her very best, that’s far too true of the character, even by the finale, who does little more than point and shoot. The attempts to show that she does actually have some individualism and distinguishability are too mild (she likes lemon soda) and too rote (she stares at kids sometimes because ovaries) and so despite the film being named after her character, Kate is utterly anonymous.

The film around her is at least a tad more realised, directed with a rambunctious energy and while Nicolas-Troyan’s influences are worn on his sleeves and entire outfit as a whole, he’s able to give Kate that much-needed boost that makes it into a real movie rather than a Netflix movie. There’s a wild, kinetic car chase and some nifty, gory fight scenes and a real sense of place, utilising the ability to actually shoot on location (remember, low bar). The 24 hours to die gimmick is of course nothing new (it recalls both 1950’s DOA and its 80s remake as well as countless copycats) but the radiation touch is at least an effectively gnarly update as Kate’s body slowly disintegrates over the course of the movie. It does of course make her superhuman fighting abilities a little bit harder to believe as her condition worsens (epipens can only do so much against polonium) but it’s clear from the outset that we’re not headed towards a happy ending.

When the last act strikes, Aleem isn’t able to find a way to reveal the twisty, if predictably so, plot with much finesse and so we’re stuck with a laughable exposition dump between two nefarious characters each telling us things they already know. Winstead maintains our attention, though, as she limps to some sort of retribution, as pointless as it might be with death a few cough-ups of blood away, her punches continuing to land with more impact than any eye-rolling attempts at profundity do. There will be more action thrillers like Kate on the way to Netflix (both Jennifer Lopez and Jessica Alba have similar films coming) but here’s hoping, and praying, that this level of basic competency can be matched with a bit more personality in the future.

Kate is available on Netflix on 10 September

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‘Kate’ Review: Lost in Assassination

Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays a vengeful contract killer in this predictable thriller.

• Share full article

By Teo Bugbee

The thriller “Kate” is an undistinguished action film that makes a hero of a hit woman. Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), guided by her wily handler, Varrick (Woody Harrelson), has been a professional since adolescence. Her only rule is to never kill in front of a child. Naturally — this being a relatively unimaginative plot — Kate betrays her principles within the first five minutes of the movie, murdering a yakuza gang member in front of his daughter.

The fallout for Kate proves worse than a mere breach of assassin’s creed. She learns that her victim’s gang has targeted her, slipping her a fatal dose of polonium. She has 24 hours to live before radiation destroys her body, and in that time, she is determined to get her revenge. But the only person who knows where she can find the shadowy leader of the gang that wants her dead is Ani (Miku Martineau), the child who witnessed her father’s slaughter.

The film takes place in Japan, and the director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan tries to use the setting to inject a shot of style into the largely routine story. There are neon cars, Kabuki theater performances and as many murders committed with samurai swords and katanas as there are with guns. The movie presents an eye-catching fantasy of a candy-colored Japanese underworld. But the exoticism feels as cheap as a whiff of a green tea and musk cologne called Tokyo wafting over a department store counter. Even Winstead, stoic in her fashionably boyish haircut, looks bored.

Kate Rated R for graphic violence, brief gore, and brief sexuality. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

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Kate Reviews

Kate is a fun and schlocky revenge thriller that appears to be pretty slick, but the lacklustre story stops it from reaching true heights.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 27, 2023

It’s not a perfect story from beginning to end either. While these action sequences are entertaining and disturbing, Kate’s characterization and her relationship with Ani, and the result is predictable.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2023

Kate delivers everything I could ever ask of a hard-hitting revenge-driven action movie. With a badass lead, great chemistry, and action moments that left me flinching on multiple occasions, this movie is a must-watch for the action aficionados out there.

Full Review | Jan 16, 2023

Nicolas-Taylor’s film brings enough visual style, subtle dark wit, and breathtaking action to make Kate a satisfying action experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 9, 2022

Martineau is both sweet and furious as Kate's sidekick and wannabe apprentice.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 17, 2022

The dialogue is stale, the characters shallow, and every narrative development is wholly predictable and pedestrian.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jun 5, 2022

Kate is a movie that nods to other, better movies, but which does enough to punch a hole in lockdown boredom.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 12, 2022

Despite some impressive fight choreography and tight pacing, we're reaching a saturation point with this kind of cinema. John Wick and Birds of Prey have set the bar high in recent years, and while Kate is playing in their ballpark, it isn't keeping up.

Full Review | Feb 11, 2022

It's got great fight choreography, wonderful performances from Winstead and Martineau, and a few clever twists, but ultimately the end of the movie left me wanting more.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 13, 2022

Temper your expectations and don't look for originality in this vehicle and you're very likely to enjoy the ride.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 15, 2021

A lean, sleek female-centric actioner from director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan that arrives with a bang, knocks your socks off for 90 minutes, and leaves you limp but weirdly invigorated.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Oct 15, 2021

The life expectancy for most of the unfortunate henchmen in Kate is instantly reduced to about a second or so once they run into the titular anti-hero of Cedric Nicolas-Troyan's ultra-slick, frenzied, hand-to-hand combat action ballet.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 15, 2021

It felt too rushed and Winstead didn't work for me.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 9, 2021

Winstead sells the carnage and keeps you invested in a screenplay that most film addicts can unfold in their heads during the first ten minutes. This is her action showcase.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Sep 30, 2021

A fun, fast-paced actioner

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 28, 2021

There's a lot of carnage and action, and Winstead fills the part well enough; it's just the uninspired script by Umair Aleem that saps any true enjoyment.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 24, 2021

Kate may seem like an ordinary lady killer flick, but sophomore director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan manages to tweak things enough to turn it into a crafty and entertaining movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Sep 23, 2021

A thoroughly unpleasant experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Sep 21, 2021

"Kate" is smoothly pieced together, but it simply echoes too many of its ancestors to earn a place among them. It's probably best for fans of Winstead and of gnarly action.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Sep 20, 2021

Mary Elizabeth Winstead... has everything to become a future action heroine. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Sep 20, 2021

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Kate review: Mary Elizabeth Winstead leads Netflix's red-meat female assassin thriller

The world is full of yoga teachers and paralegals and mechanical engineers. It is less full, presumably, of female assassins. (If you've ever met one you either didn't know it, or you're dead.) And yet there has never been more of them in movies — cool-eyed executioners who slash and blast and burn their way across the screen, grinding the notion of a weaker sex beneath their boot heels and snuffing out lives like half-smoked cigarettes.

As the titular star of Kate (out Friday on Netflix), Fargo 's Mary Elizabeth Winstead is exactly that kind of killer: a stoic Jane Wick working in tandem with her handler (a blunt, cheerful Woody Harrelson ) to take out nefarious players in the Japanese underworld. She doesn't ask questions and she doesn't miss, but executing a man in front of his traumatized teenage daughter (Miku Martineau) does give her pause. And when a follow-up job goes wobbly she discovers that she's been poisoned, fatally. (This would all be a spoiler if it weren't handled so economically in the first 15 minutes.) That leaves approximately 24 hours to settle her business — and her business being what it is, there will be blood.

It's a feat that director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan ( The Huntsman: Winter's War ) manages to turn the movie's hoary One Last Job scenario into a thriller as lizard-brain satisfying as it is; his lens zips and dips across Tokyo, the city's bright neon chaos a kinetic backdrop to a series of increasingly baroque kills. (At one point, a murder also casually becomes a haircut.) Subtle it's not: Kate is red-meat storytelling, all broad outlines and crunched bones. But there's a visual wit and visceral energy to it that other recent efforts (the pop-feminist comic-book gloss Gunpowder Milkshake , also on Netflix, and Amazon Prime's spectacularly silly Jolt , featuring a rampaging Kate Beckinsale) struggle to find.

Aside from a brief interlude at a hotel bar (with The Flight Attendant 's Michiel Huisman ) and a few twitchy impulses of maternal feeling, Winstead's Kate is too tough, and then too far gone, to really develop much of a relationship with the audience aside from a few wry, biting one-liners; she's come to kill, or die trying. But the scattered bits that do come through are a reminder that the genre's best — Kill Bill and the original French La Femme Nikita ; the snappy 1996 Geena Davis vehicle The Long Kiss Goodnight and 2014's great, ludicrous Lucy , starring Scarlett Johansson — root their adrenalized set pieces in protagonists who actually seem to have inner lives, no matter how extreme. It's no mystery why we love to watch these women on screen: They're clever, ruthless, and ferociously capable in ways that the rest of us will never be, superheroes without the capes and moral obligations. And they don't need any man's permission to land. Grade: B

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Kate review: Netflix’s action-thriller is worth watching for one reason alone

Come for the gunfights, stay for the star.

You’ve seen movies like Kate before.

Netflix’s latest action-thriller, which premieres Friday, uses many of the same tropes that have littered the hitman subgenre for decades, and especially those ones that have become more common in the wake of John Wick ’s success.

Present and accounted for is a neon-lit international setting — in this case, Tokyo — and a seemingly indestructible protagonist, hell-bent on revenge. Kate doesn’t offer much besides that in terms of narrative surprises or filmmaking ingenuity, even leaning on the frustratingly cliché “last job gone wrong” set up to serve as its inciting incident.

But what Kate does have going for it is star Mary Elizabeth Winstead, one of the most charismatic and capable actresses of her generation. Unfortunately, Winstead has flown under the radar for most of her career; Kate , which gives the actress 106 minutes in the spotlight, should change that once and for all. And Winstead, to her credit, doesn’t let the opportunity pass her by.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the titular assassin in Netflix’s Kate.

Let’s say you’ve been poisoned and have 24 hours left to live: What do you do with your last day?

Most of us would probably opt to spend it with our families or do one thing we’ve spent years wanting to try. But if you’re Kate, you’re going to spend those precious final hours on a blood-soaked rampage, in search of the person who poisoned you.

Played in the film by a surprisingly ruthless and enraged Winstead, Kate is the last person you can imagine crossing. Armed with a desire for revenge, several doses of heavy painkillers, and a hankering for lemon soda, Kate sets out on a quest across Tokyo in search of the yakuza boss she believes sentenced her to death. It’s a simple premise, opening the door for Kate to follow its titular protagonist through an unending stream of gunfights, chases, and massacres.

The film, directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan ( The Huntsman: Winter’s War ) from a screenplay by Umair Aleem ( Extraction ), delivers on that promise, albeit to varying degrees of success. Indeed, while Winstead’s Kate approaches each of the film’s action sequences with equal ferocity, only a few set pieces stand out. That includes a fight at a Japanese restaurant/social club, which sees Kate single-handedly taking down an assortment of yakuza bosses and goons across a series of identical, black-and-white rooms and corridors.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead storms in, shades ready, in Kate.

It’s during this extended sequence that Kate is at its most thrilling, visually controlled, and inventive.

From long Steadicam tracking shots that follow Kate as she infiltrates the facility to aerial shots that pivot and whirl in time with Kate’s movements and spins, Nicolas-Troyan employs a number of unexpected camera angles and cutting techniques throughout, investing the scene with an energy and style that the rest of the film largely lacks.

All that said, it’s Winstead’s lead performance that ultimately lifts Kate out of total mediocrity. Coming off her recent, similarly dynamic and vengeful performance as The Huntress in last year’s Birds of Prey , Winstead proves her mettle as a legitimate action star with Kate . She invests in the character so heavily that it becomes impossible to look away from her performance, which becomes more layered and human as Kate’s body is ravaged by the poison slowly killing her.

This character is tired and angry — and for good reason — but Winstead never lets Kate become an emotionless killing machine. Be it through a small, shuddered breath or a perfectly timed scream of rage, the actress ensures that everything Kate does feels emotionally motivated and authentic, even when she’s firing bullets into the hundredth unlucky henchman sent her way.

It’s a muscular and charismatic performance, and undeniably the most interesting thing that Kate has to offer.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead prepares a mean haymaker in Kate.

Unfortunately, Kate invests far less heavily into the culture and history of its setting than it does the emotions of its killer protagonist. The film uses the city of Tokyo largely for its visual traits and charms, which makes one dignified character’s third-act remarks about Westerners gorging on “cultures they don’t understand” feel more like a pointed bit of self-criticism than Nicolas-Troyan and his collaborators likely intended.

The film works best as an enjoyable — if by-the-numbers — popcorn thriller. Its attempts at social commentary and emotional profundity fall flat, and the various twists and turns it takes should be easy to see coming for anyone who has seen more than a handful of action movies.

In most instances, such faults would sink a movie like Kate . But every time it looks like the film might succumb to its more formulaic, clichéd instincts, there’s Winstead at the ready, potent enough to lift it back up again.

Kate debuts Friday, September 10th on Netflix.

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• DVD & Streaming
• Action/Adventure

Content Caution

In Theaters

• Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Kate; Woody Harrelson as Varrick; Miku Patricia Martineau as Ani; Jun Kunimura as Kijima; Tadanobu Asano as Renji

Home Release Date

• September 10, 2021
• Cedric Nicolas-Troyan

Distributor

Movie review.

Kate is a killer.

Yeah, you could say she has killer good looks, but she’s actually a straight-up killer. Trained by her mentor and father-figure, Varrick, she started in the assassination biz when she was just a young girl—right after her parents were both murdered—and has been going strong ever since.

Of course, now that she’s in her 30s, Kate’s kinda thinking that she’s been a part of this deadly circus a bit too long. She hasn’t had a life of her own. She’s been “managed” and “handled,” but never really lived. And after a recent Osaka, Japan, mission, involving a target with his daughter standing right next to him, Kate has finally made up her mind to leave.

Kate may be an assassin. But she’s always had one rule of her own. One simple rule: no kids! But now her handlers have pushed her to break that boundary. So, Kate’s quitting. She’s agreed to one last hit, but after that she’s out.

Varrick eyes her when she tells him of her plans and asks what she could possibly want from this “real life” she keeps talking about. “Family, kids, picket fence, dogs, suburbs?” he wonders. “Yeah, something like that,” she replies.

Before Kate can finish her job and follow through on her plans, however, something unexpected happens. After a casual fling with a guy she meets at her hotel bar, she ends up poisoned. But it’s not food poisoning or maybe a bottle of wine gone bad. No, she finds she’s suffering from accelerated ARS: acute radiation syndrome.

She’s somehow been targeted with Polonium 204, a radioactive substance that there’s no coming back from. And after she staggers up from unconsciousness, the hospital doc says she has about a day left to live. “But don’t worry,” he tells her. “We’ll make you as comfortable as possible.”

Kate isn’t worried about comfort, though. She wants answers. Was this poisoning a blowback from her last job? Is it a hit from another secretive organization? Something even more personal? She’s got 24 hours to find out who wants her dead and why. And she’s got 20-plus years of experience and skills to help her find and rip out every answer she wants.

When she finds what she needs, then someone—or a lot of someones —will die for what they’ve taken from her.

Kate wanted a real life. Now she’s going to dole out some bloody death.

Positive Elements

The one positive in this story of violence and death is the fact that Kate wants to embrace a happy and contented life. For her, that involves the possibility of settling down and having a family.

Kate later meets a teen girl named Ani who’s connected to the Kijima clan, a Yakuza gang that Kate’s trying to infiltrate. The two connect. Kate sees some part of the family she’s longed for in Ani. And Ani, in turn, sees Kate as a representation of the tough and resilient mother she never knew.

Kate also takes steps to protect Ani and to keep her separate from the violence that’s taking place. “You’re young. You have time to forget,” she tells the girl.

Spiritual Elements

Sexual content.

Kate hooks up with a guy she meets at a bar. They go back to her room to have sex. We see the two kissing, undressing and caressing on the bed before the camera cuts away. She’s wearing her underwear, and he’s shirtless.

There’s more male skin bared in this pic than female. Kate walks through a bathhouse filled with naked men, for instance. They’re covered only with loin cloths. Several other men in the film strip off shirts or robes to bare their upper bodies.

Violent Content

This film prides itself on its blood, gore and violence. Throughout the course of her encounters with large, angry Yakuza gang members, Kate gets pummeled with fists; battered with various weapons and solid objects; thrown, kicked, stabbed and shot over and over again.

Her physical form and features become more and more bloodied and torn after each successive conflict—including heavily bleeding scalp wounds; a bloody, pounded-out pupil; a wound in her cheek opened by slowly pressed-in scissor blades; and scores of nasty bruises and scars on her shoulders, arms and upper body. (She removes her bloody shirt, for instance, to stitch up an open knife wound on her waist, which reveals dark purple bruising all over her torso.)

On top of all that the radiation poisoning also impacts Kate, giving her nose bleeds and causing her to regularly spit up quantities of blood and bile.

The men Kate attacks, however, all receive the worst of it. We see throats vividly slashed and left gushing. Bullets blow out neks and heads. Swords impale and gut men. Heads are lopped off. Kate uses knifes to stab eyes, as well as  and jam up through chins and out noses.

We see a number of victims with their skulls split open by either bullets or heavy objects. Legs and arms are snapped sideways in the midst of battle. One guy gets killed by a defibrillator zap to his temples. A man is pushed face-first into a red-hot grill. Someone is electrocuted after falling onto live electric wires. And several men are used as human meat shields before being shot point-blank in the face and discarded.

In all of the group conflicts, there are at least a few victims left writhing and moaning, some with gut shots, others with profusely bleeding wounds.

Crude or Profane Language

There are about 25 f-words and a dozen s-words mixed into the script  with a handful of uses each of “a–hole,” “b–ch” and “b–tard.” “Whore” is spit out once as is a misuse of God’s name.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Lots of different people smoke throughout the film, including Kate. Kate drinks wine in a couple different scenes. And it’s implied that she’s poisoned through a bottle of wine. There are others drinking in a bar setting. While in the hospital, Kate holds a doctor at gunpoint and gets five syringes filled with a powerful stimulant. She injects herself at various points in the film to counteract the physically debilitating effects of her radiation poisoning.

Other Negative Elements

Kate vomits repeatedly from the effect of her poisoning and removes teeth due to her toxicity as well. Several men disdain Ani’s mixed Japanese and gaijin heritage. Someone calls her a “half-race b–ch.”

There’s a Hollywood movie trend these days to demonstrate the industry’s progressively modern bona fides by casting a female lead in your typical hard-hitting actioner. It’s often as believable as tossing an average movie reviewer into an MMA ring and expecting a keyboard-jockey win.

That said, star Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s blend of pretty and gritty can almost make you believe that stereotype anyway. You almost swallow the idea that she could be poisoned with radioactive material; jacked up with stimulants; battered repeatedly about the face, head and upper body; shot once or twice; and still be ready to take on a room full of Yakuza thugs after a bloody spit and a gore-encrusted squint. Like I said: Almost.

Of course, there’s more than just believing when it comes to the kind of pulp violence shown here. To get into this pic, you have to kinda enjoy seeing a woman being pounded, stabbed and bloodily abused for 90 minutes. And then you’ll also have to revel in all her muscled, male attackers being rent and ripped in turn as the titular heroine pokes blades in eyes, blows out throats, mercilessly rams sharp objects up through jaws and pops heads like so many gory soap bubbles. You’ve gotta really dig this movie’s stylized ballet of butchery to make it to end credits.

Oh, and you shouldn’t have any queasiness about really nasty language either. Because Kate doesn’t hold back when it comes to noxiously profane spews. Even from its teen stars.

So, keep all of that in mind when you’re perusing the newest movie stream offerings. And if you decide you’d prefer something less blood-spewing and misogynistic you could choose, oh, just about anything other than Kate .

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Kate Movie Review: Mary Elizabeth Winstead steals the show as a complex, questioning assassin

Rating: ( 3.5 / 5).

Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s titular character Kate reminds me a lot of Blake Lively’s Stephanie Patrick from The Rhythm Section . They may hail from vastly different circumstances, but there is a striking vulnerability at the core of the two women. Kate is accorded so much intensity and depth that she is capable of sniping targets unemotionally for years, and yet, experiences a crisis of conscience while assassinating a man being accompanied by his teenage daughter. The film pays some homage to past and present mainstays of the genre, finding itself as a Kill Bill meets John Wick sort of feature. The action/combat sequences (hand-to-hand, guns, Samurai swords, you name it) are stylistically pieced together and ingeniously shot, making them a treat for the aesthete’s senses. Set in the heart of Tokyo, the Japanese music featured ranges from pop to punk to hard rock, distinguishing itself as one of the complementary characters in the story. Some scenes don’t work nearly as well sans the OST’s required auditory effect. Kate doesn’t say all that much, and we are given but a string of brilliantly arranged snippets from the past to provide us with a basic background of her upbringing. It is through Winstead’s sheer emotive force that we are transported into her character’s pain, her all-consuming guilt, her need for some form of redemption, some form of closure, before it’s too late. Add flair and a unique sense of style to that! Even when bruised, bloodied and staggering from the aftereffects of a deadly toxin, she has your admiration and support! Those who have made her into this ruthless hitwoman are wary of the day the tables will turn.

Director - Cedric Nicolas-Troyan

Cast – Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Woody Harrelson, Miku Patricia Martineau, Tadanobu Asano, Jun Kunimura 

Streaming On – Netflix

I wouldn’t go as far as to compare the artistic presentation of the film’s violence to that of Tarantino’s touch, but the influence is undeniable. Kate possesses certain shades of the Bride from Kill Bill as well. The overwhelming need to empathise with such an antiheroic character – keeping in mind all the terrible things she has done, all the lives she has extinguished – comes from the fact that she is human, she is flawed, and she does feel. She isn’t an out-and-out sociopath with snazzy gun-toting skills and fancy shades. She is a damaged person who was manipulated as a child, brought up to be a certain way. Despite the fact that this is the only life she has known since her early teens, she hasn’t entirely lost the ability to think for herself, to question her reality. Her handler Varrick (Woody Harrelson) has raised her in the absence of parental love or guidance; his is the only affection (if one can go so far as to call it that) she has known. As her trainer, there is only so much he can provide emotionally – how else is he to prepare her to be the most clinically efficient assassin out there? What she needs (has perhaps always needed) is agency…to have the power to be her own woman. Kate begins growing out of her mentor’s shadow as soon as she’s poisoned with a deadly toxin - revenge for a failed assassination attempt on an influential Yakuza member. Her full range of human emotions comes to the fore as she grapples with her own mortality.

This assassin film, as the title suggests, is all about its tortured central character. Yes, there is the teenage Ani (Miku Patricia Martineau), who Kate sees her younger self in (her head tells her to leave, her heart tells her to stay and protect), and handler Varrick, who is convinced of the extensive influence over his ward, and the mysterious, senior Yakuza member, Kijima (Jun Kunimura), purportedly responsible for the poisoning, but it is on her that everything revolves. For all the prodigious talent that is Woody Harrelson, his Varrick needed better writing. The man’s scheming is too predictable for my liking. The odd bond between Kate and Ani is one of the film’s high points. And it is Ani, and the child’s ultimate well-being, that becomes Kate’s moral purpose. It is perhaps not authentic enough to believe that all members of a high-ranking Yakuza family speak fluent English when called upon to do so, but there is enough Japanese to go around to offset that dynamic.

While Kate does have its flaws and does borrow from similar efforts of the past, it keeps you heavily invested in its main character. Time is of the essence, and she does everything at her disposal to convince the audience and herself that her whole life wasn’t a lie and that her recently acquired conscience will see her through to some form of closure. Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s superlative lead performance lends credence to a highly complex hitwoman who is slowly dying from within – and I’m not just referring to the fatal toxin ravaging her system.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Kate’ on Netflix, Where An Assassin Marked For Death Kills Her Way To The Truth

Where to stream:.

• mary elizabeth winstead

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Stream it or skip it: 'a gentleman in moscow' on showtime/paramount+, where a count spends years in house arrest in a swanky soviet hotel, new shows & movies to watch this weekend: 'a gentleman in moscow' on paramount+ with showtime + more, ewan mcgregor, mary elizabeth winstead used intimacy coordinator when filming 'a gentleman in moscow' despite being married: "it's still necessary".

Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s poisoned assassin has one very personal mission to complete before she kicks the bucket in Kate (Netflix), a stylized exercise in genre filmmaking and extended fight sequences from the director of The Huntsman: Winter’s War and writer of Extraction . That mission? Simple: find the poisoners and dispatch their asses. But in the underworld Kate inhabits, the truth and who’s telling it is a lot more difficult to uncover.

KATE : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Kate gets its kicks from establishing a brief timeline for its titular character, an assassin handy with rifles, pistols, edge weapons and her trusty fists, and setting her on a pathway to some semblance of satisfaction. It isn’t long after we meet her in the midst of killing a mark that Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is poisoned. It’s “polonium-204” that’s punched her ticket — no antidote, no extended life. So Kate descends into the Tokyo underworld to discover who slipped her the mickey, and tangles with an ever-increasing number of yakuza foot soldiers while she stays ambulatory with auto injections of stimulants. Varrick (Woody Harrelson), her executive-level handler in this assassin’s life, isn’t offering a whole lot of help, so Kate abducts mouthy teenager Ani (Miku Martineau) as a bargaining chip — her uncle Kajima (Jun Kunimura) sits atop the yakuza clan responsible for Kate’s impending demise.

Kate director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan sometimes employs a camera that spins around, either matching the barrel roll of the car Kate is crashing in or following the flailing body of a henchman she’s just sliced apart. But he also keeps the camera remarkably aware of the spatial chaos during a ten-on-one pitched battle amidst the shoji screens of a Japanese club, and amplifies the neon murk as Kate and Ani tumble through nighttime Tokyo in search of Kajima. The thrilling fight choreography and moody atmosphere are effective enough to maintain forward motion, and the film is aided immensely by Winstead’s ability to play an increasingly bloodied and bruised Kate to the hilt, even though the script stalls out whenever there isn’t gunplay in an entertainment district or knives being thrust through necks.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Stunts in ‘Kate’ Proves She Needs a ‘Birds of Prey’ Spinoff

Performance Worth Watching: “All of you asshole hyenas getting fat off of my dad’s carcass!” Newcomer Miku Martineau really leans into the role of Ani, the misfit yakuza niece who forms an unlikely bond with Kate. Only a few minutes spent with the assassin and she’s already threatening mobsters to their face and twisting conventional teen indifference into something serrated and closer to junior badass territory.

Memorable Dialogue: “I’ll be dead before the night’s over!” Ani complains to Kate at one point, but her captor has another hard-bitten one liner ready in the hopper. “That makes two of us.” With her mouth a flat line, her finger on the trigger, and her mind on the mayhem and the mayhem on her mind, Winstead plays Kate close to the bone and cold-blooded to a fault. And why shouldn’t she? We’re watching Kate’s final mortal act transpire.

Sex and Skin: Nothing much here.

Our Take: Do all of the secret assassin societies at work in film today have an annual meeting somewhere? A union? A guild? (Dan Aykroyd wanted fellow freelance hitman John Cusack to join his fledgling union in Grosse Pointe Blank , but those overtures were shot full of holes.) With John Wick and the other members in good standing with the High Table transforming New York City into a battleground, and the League of Shadows lurking about, and ancillary groups like the culture of assassins in Netflix’s recent Gunpowder Milkshake regularly unloading munitions on each other, you’d think the vaguely defined authority Kate works for would run into trouble finding uncompromised “marks.” Isn’t there a finite number of crime bosses, shot callers, and government-issue evil doers to go around? Where’s the trade union regulation? We won’t ever know, or at least not this time, because Kate’s organization isn’t defined, it’s only embodied. Woody Harrelson’s Varrick is the assassin’s handler, mother, father, employer — and someone we trust less with every dwindling moment of his screen time.

The bigger questions about backstory and framework that Kate doesn’t ask appear like thought bubbles and then dissipate. Thus free from the constraints of place and precedent, the film becomes an interconnected series of shooting galleries, or suites of video game levels, with a bleeding, wheezing, but still keen-for-killing Kate barreling through successive throngs of yakuza in her death’s door quest for satisfaction. (A deadly encounter with a mob world higher-up played by Japanese musician Miyavi makes terrific use of space, transforming a modernist penthouse into an arsenal of makeshift murder weapons.) It’s more exhausting with each level, but still possible to ride the style and brutal fisticuffs all the way to Kate’s inevitable finish line.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Led by a resilient, physically propulsive performance from Mary Elizabeth Winstead, high style and higher body counts combine to propel Kate past its dimly imagined world of assassins for hire and murky professional double crosses.

Will you stream or skip #Kate on @netflix ? #SIOSI #KateNetflix — Decider (@decider) September 10, 2021

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

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Kate – Netflix Review (4/5)

Posted by Karina "ScreamQueen" Adelgaard | Sep 12, 2021 | 3 minutes

KATE on Netflix is an intense and wild ride of an action-thriller. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is perfect in the title role. Overall, the entire cast is really great and the action scenes are breathtaking. Even the story works. Read our Kate  movie review here and check it out on Netflix!

KATE is a new Netflix action-thriller about a female assassin who realizes she’s poisoned and has 24 hours left to live. At the most. Obviously, she wants to find out who has killed her  and  get revenge before she dies.

The cast features Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Woody Harrelson, and the young Miku Patricia Martineau. Everyone in the cast of this movie delivers exactly what it requires. A comparison to both John Wick  and  Atomic Blonde wouldn’t be wrong. Especially since the action scenes are truly amazing!

Continue reading our Kate  movie review below.

Not about survival, just straight-up revenge

Because Kate has been poisoned, there’s no point in talking about survival. She has been murdered in a way that’s truly brutal (and very Chernobyl -like), so there is  no hope for her. However, that doesn’t mean she should just wait for death to come. Hell no, Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) needs revenge.

After a life of being an assassin – she was “recruited” at a very young age – this is the obvious and only course of action.

It’s actually sort of refreshing to see such a badass female character who has no desire to be soft or likable. Hell, she doesn’t even have to worry about being safe. She is very literally a dead woman walking. Still, she does need to work all her connections and allies to find out who has ordered her hit before she’s dead.

More Mary Elizabeth Winstead, please!

I’ve always liked Mary Elizabeth Winstead and the portrayal of the title character in Kate is no exception. She was also in the Harley Quinn movie  Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipations of One Harley Quinn (2020) as “The Huntress”. In other words, action scenes where she’s a skilled fighter are not new to her.

In fact,  Birds of Prey also introduced Jurnee Smollett in a kick-ass action role as “Black Canary”. She then went on to play one of the leads in Lovecraft Country which were truly a kick-ass series.

To me, Mary Elizabeth Winstead first made a huge impact with her starring role in  10 Cloverfield Lane  (2016). I mean, sure, I know she was in  Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010) and in  Death Proof  (2007). Hell, she was John McClane’s daughter in both Die Hard 4.0 (2007) and  A Good Day to Die Hard (2013). Still, to me,  10 Cloverfield Lane  was a defining role of hers.

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Our review of 10 Cloverfield Lane   here >

Along with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, you’ll see Woody Harrelson in a key role as Kate’s mentor and handler. This is a classic Woody role, but not as comedy-heavy as the  Zombieland -movies nor as dark as  True Detective . Somewhere in between the two. A bit more like his character in  The Hunger Games .

Finally, Miku Patricia Martineau managed to make a huge  and profound impact on me as the young, but fierce, Ani.  Hopefully, we’ll see Miku Patricia Martineau in more movies soon!

Watch  Kate  on Netflix now!

Cedric Nicolas-Troyan is the director of  Kate  while the screenplay was written by Umair Aleem. This is only the second movie written by Umair Aleem after the 2015 debut with  Extraction.

Prior to directing this Netflix action-thriller, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan directed  The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016). That particular movie starred Charlize Theron , Emily Blunt , and Jessica Chastain . Basically, my point is that he’s used to working with actors in kick-ass female roles, which comes across in this one as well.

If you like watching bloody action movies with an intriguing plot and brilliant fight scenes, then Kate is definitely for you.

Kate is out on Netflix from September 10, 2021.

Director: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Miku Martineau, Woody Harrelson

Meticulous and preternaturally skilled, Kate is the perfect specimen of a finely tuned assassin at the height of her game. But when she uncharacteristically blows an assignment targeting a member of the yakuza in Tokyo, she quickly discovers she’s been poisoned, a brutally slow execution that gives her less than 24 hours to exact revenge on her killers. As her body swiftly deteriorates, Kate forms an unlikely bond with the teenage daughter of one of her past victims.

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About The Author

Karina "ScreamQueen" Adelgaard

I write reviews and recaps on Heaven of Horror. And yes, it does happen that I find myself screaming, when watching a good horror movie. I love psychological horror, survival horror and kick-ass women. Also, I have a huge soft spot for a good horror-comedy. Oh yeah, and I absolutely HATE when animals are harmed in movies, so I will immediately think less of any movie, where animals are harmed for entertainment (even if the animals are just really good actors). Fortunately, horror doesn't use this nearly as much as comedy. And people assume horror lovers are the messed up ones. Go figure!

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Common sense media reviewers.

Action thriller has graphic violence, language, stereotypes.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

No positive messages or themes.

Kate is a vicious, brutal, unflinching killer. She

Many Asian people in the cast, but the majority ar

Strong bloody violence throughout. Lots of gory de

A man and a woman have sex on a bed (no nudity) wi

Strong language throughout includes "f--k," "f--ki

The anime Deathnote plays in the background in one

Adults smoke cigarettes stylishly and drink alcoho

Parents need to know that Kate is an incredibly violent, bloody, and brutal action film with strong language throughout. Not for kids, this thriller finds an assassin racing to find out who and why she has been poisoned. Mowing down anyone who gets in her way, Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) eventually runs…

Positive Messages

Positive role models.

Kate is a vicious, brutal, unflinching killer. She does show remorse for past deeds, but it takes slowly dying of poison for her to seek redemption. Sometimes the villains aren't as clear as they might seem.

Diverse Representations

Many Asian people in the cast, but the majority are yakuza, and most only seem to be present to die horrible deaths. Renji and Kijima at least have depth and feel like real people with histories, beliefs, desires; other main roles are quite thin and one-note. Despite a Japanese setting, White characters are the protagonists, with Kate especially poised to fall into the White savior role amidst the movie's mostly flat depictions of Asian people. One biracial character with a "gaijin" mother might be seen as a stereotype, rather than a realistic portrait of a girl witnessing and experiencing extreme violence, family murders, and trauma. Some yakuza openly bemoan "the West" and call Anni "half-blood."

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Strong bloody violence throughout. Lots of gory deaths, point-blank shots to the head, blood and splatter, stabbings, gunfights, gunshot wounds, hand-to-hand combat. Sword and knife fights, a decapitation, knives going through faces, electrocution, fingers sliced off, throats slit, broken bones. Also sniper shots, pistol whippings, grenade explosions. A woman gets drugged, a girl gets chained to a toilet, and a woman gets into a terrible car crash.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A man and a woman have sex on a bed (no nudity) with the covers up. Kate sometimes takes her top off to bandage or clean wounds but is always in her underwear. In scene at bath house, men wear underwear but are otherwise naked.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language throughout includes "f--k," "f--king," "motherf-----r," "s--t," "bitch," "whore," "ass," and "damn."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

The anime Deathnote plays in the background in one scene.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults smoke cigarettes stylishly and drink alcoholic beverages. A woman gets drugged and lethally poisoned.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Kate is an incredibly violent, bloody, and brutal action film with strong language throughout. Not for kids, this thriller finds an assassin racing to find out who and why she has been poisoned. Mowing down anyone who gets in her way, Kate ( Mary Elizabeth Winstead ) eventually runs into a girl who significantly affected the course of Kate's recent life. Expect lots of bloody violence, gunfights, point-blank shots to the head, gunshot wounds, holes in bodies, stabbings, knives going into faces, necks being slit, fingers getting sliced off, hand-to-hand combat, and a decapitation. A woman gets drugged, a girl gets chained to a toilet, and a woman gets into a terrible car crash. There's a brief sex scene without nudity, and another brief scene shows men in their underwear at a bath house. Adults smoke cigarettes stylishly and drink alcoholic beverages. A woman gets drugged and lethally poisoned. Strong language throughout includes "f--k," "f--king," "motherf-----r," "s--t," "bitch," "whore," "ass," and "damn." The film has some stereotypical representations and depictions of Asian people. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (2)
• Kids say (6)

Based on 2 parent reviews

Loved this movie!

Cursing doesn’t look good on the girl., what's the story.

In KATE, a brutally efficient assassin ( Mary Elizabeth Winstead ) finds herself poisoned and with only 24 hours to live. She must find out who did this to her and why. With help from her mentor and handler, Varrick ( Woody Harrelson ), Kate just might be able to save herself. But when an innocent teenage girl gets caught up in the mix, will Kate have time to save her, too?

Is It Any Good?

The violence on display is brutal, creative, and intense, but lots of it might be too much for some viewers. Beyond the violence, however, Kate isn't great. For one, Kate's backstory is thin and simply not enough for the audience to get invested in her or her story. Unfortunately, this means that for each wound, every flinch of pain, and all the times Kate suffers, many viewers might not care. And the problem is that the audience needs to care about Kate saving herself, not dying of poison, and finding redemption.

Further, Kate's relationship with Varrick isn't established or built well, and their dynamic or chemistry is incredibly flat. Varrick, a kind of father/mentor figure to Kate, claims at one point that Kate is the only person in the world he has ever loved. But this is never evident in their interactions, in any flashbacks, or in dialogue. Lastly, many viewers might find the story and general idea of Kate to be racist, as the story is another White savior construction that also features a White person murdering hundreds of Asian people. Additionally, it repeats many stereotypes about Asian and Japanese people specifically.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about violence in action and thriller movies. Was the violence in Kate over-the-top, just right, or not extreme enough? Why?

How do you think this movie, including the characters, plot, and action, compares to other action movies of similar ilk?

Not that it has to, but what do you think this film would've looked like if it featured an entirely Asian and/or Asian American cast? Would this alone fix the "White savior" problem? Why, or why not?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : September 10, 2021
• Cast : Mary Elizabeth Winstead , Woody Harrelson , Miku Patricia Martineau , Tadanobu Asano
• Director : Cedric Nicolas-Troyan
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Asian actors
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Run time : 106 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : Strong bloody violence and language throughout
• Last updated : February 17, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Within the action genre, there are plenty of movies that revolve around one main character - particularly a current or retired assassin - going on a mission with determination to see it through for whatever reason. In Kate , the filmmakers put a spin on that trope by setting up the story so that the main character only has a day to live and must complete her mission within that timeframe. The movie is directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan ( The Huntsman: Winter's War ) from a script by Umair Aleem ( Extraction ), with John Wick co-director David Leitch serving as one of Kate's producers.  Kate has some decently fun action, despite certain trite directorial choices, with Mary Elizabeth Winstead serving as the movie's main bright spot.

The film follows an assassin named Kate (Winstead), who is forced by her handlers to kill a man in front of his daughter. Ten months later when she's still struggling to get over the incident, she tells her handler Varrick (Woody Harrelson) that she wants to retire from being an assassin after finishing up her next job. However, something goes wrong when Kate is meant to kill Yakuza leader Kijima (Jun Kunimura), collapsing and waking up in the hospital. She learns she's been poisoned with a radioactive substance and only has 24 hours to live. Determined to track down and kill the man responsible, Kate ends up befriending the young daughter of the man she killed previously, the teenaged Ani (Miku Martineau). With Ani's help as her health deteriorates, Kate sets out to avenge her own murder.

Related:  Fall 2021 Movie Preview: Every Movie Releasing (And Where To Watch Them)

At its heart, Kate is a mixture of well-worn action movie tropes. The main character is a girl who's been raised to be an assassin by a father figure whose own morality is questionable, and whose life is upended as she's sent on a mission she throws herself into it with reckless abandon. The result is, unfortunately, Kate feeling like an amalgamation of other noteworthy action movies - such as Leitch's films  John Wick and Atomic Blonde - instead of its own thing. While there is some fun action, it doesn't necessarily feel fresh or exciting, especially as Nicolas-Troyan employs certain (and extremely overused) camera tricks, like having blood splatter on the camera (a favorite of directors when 3D movies first became popular).

Perhaps the most fresh and compelling aspect of Kate is Winstead's dynamic with newcomer Martineau. Though a jaded assassin/action hero teaming up with a fresh-faced and naïve youngster is another trope of the movie genre, the actors bring enough personality and charm to the unlikely friendship to sustain the film. The relationship comes off a little underdeveloped due to the restraints of the script, with Aleem's story plodding along through predictable plot beats, action set pieces and the occasional moment of character development. In addition to Winstead and Martineau, Harrelson is a delight as Varrick, while Kunimura brings an exceptional gravitas to the movie. All told, Kate assembled a talented cast, but they're kneecapped by the underwhelming script.

Ultimately, Kate is a fine watch for fans of action movies, Winstead, or anyone particularly interested in the movie's premise. While it doesn't necessarily reinvent the genre or provide an imaginative take on action-thrillers, it's entertaining enough to sustain viewers through the movie's hour and 46-minute runtime. However, it's also not a necessary watch, and those who haven't been intrigued by the premise or the trailers focused on Winstead are certainly fine to skip this particular movie.

Like many of Netflix's original movies, Kate feels like another release that had potential to be good, but falls well short of the mark. So, like Netflix's other films, viewers can check out Kate if they've run out of other things to watch, but it doesn't feel destined to become one of the streamer's viral hits.

Next: Kate Movie Trailer

Kate starts streaming Friday, September 10 on Netflix. It is 106 minutes long and rated R for strong bloody violence and language throughout.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

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Our rating:.

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Kate Review: 24 Hours To Kill

The post-" John Wick " landscape of action cinema has given us an ever-expanding new crop of slick, neon-drenched, intimate character thrillers, and at this point it's fair to ask how much more this particular subgenre boom has left to give us. We see trailers for films like "Kate," the new Netflix original revenge film that follows the title character as she spends her final hours hunting down those who wronged her, and we wonder how predictable the narrative will be, how many action beats will feel ripped from other films we've already seen, how much yet another film that looks and feels like this can possibly contribute to action movies as they've unfolded over the course of the last half-decade or so.

If you're an action movie junkie, it's natural to think these things at first glance, but "Kate" is a film that reminds you that these thoughts don't really matter much when you're in the right hands. Anchored in Mary Elizabeth Winstead 's searing title performance and packed with visual style to spare, "Kate" is a film that wears its influences firmly on its sleeve but never lets those influences dictate where its heart should go, and that makes it both compelling and, in its way, soulful.

Visual style to spare

Winstead's Kate is an assassin — and a very good one, trained from childhood by her handler, Varrick ( Woody Harrelson ), to have ice water in her veins and never miss a target. As she gets older, though, Kate's thinking it might be time to get out of the hired killer game and see what else is out there, and she's on the verge of making that freedom happen. Then, just before what's supposed to be her final job in Tokyo, someone slips her a deadly dose of radiation poisoning. With hours to live, Kate sets out to find the people who poisoned her and settle every score she can before the poison claims her.

This is the catalyst for Kate's bloody revenge journey, but perhaps somewhat surprisingly it's not the only engine pushing the plot forward. The honor falls to Ani (Miku Martineau), a teenage girl with family ties to Kate's targets, who forms an unlikely bond with the dying assassin on her road to revenge. Writer Umair Aleem wisely adds Ani as someone for Kate to talk to on her road to doom, then pushes that dynamic further than their early encounters might suggest. That this relationship exists at all is a boon to "Kate." That Aleem has the presence of mind to show us how it evolves is one of the film's greatest assets.

Then there's director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, who heaps visual charm on the film in fight sequences, Tokyo dance clubs, and everything in between. Nicolas-Troyan began his career in visual effects, and it shows, as "Kate" dazzles with hot pink-laced car chase sequences and fights staged in Tokyo dining rooms painted black and white to look like a backdrop from a Kurosawa samurai film or the climactic fight from "Kill Bill Vol. 1." As the film moves at breakneck speed from street fights near Tokyo food stalls to showdowns in glass high-rises, Nicolas-Troyan pulls from a tremendous grab bag of influences — you can see everything from " Blade Runner " to "Speed Racer" to any number of anime films in his compositions — but he never loses focus on the film's true center: The title character, and Winstead's knockout portrayal of her.

Winstead commands the screen

The first thing we learn about Kate, even before the central engine of "Kate" starts to really churn, is that she wants a life beyond the deathbringing profession she's been wrapped up in for the entirety of her adulthood. It's a simple motivation, one we've seen in countless films about assassins, but the great success of the film is Winstead's ability to lend this feeling credence, grace, and vulnerability, even when the guns start blazing.

If "Kate" has a central flaw, it's that nothing about its overall plot feels especially surprising or new. It's not a novel complaint, but it feels true through fight scene after fight scene, even when the film makes an effort to throw in a twist or two. What we often want most from an action film is that sense of jaw-on-the-floor surprise, even if it's momentary, and while "Kate" is able to tiptoe up to that with its plot every now and then, it never quite crosses that threshold. Despite its stylishness, it feels, at times, a little paint-by-numbers.

I mention all that in part to acknowledge the film's shortcomings, but more importantly to note that, because of Winstead, none of that really matters with "Kate." Her performance is so dialed in, so crackling with intensity and exhaustion and all the other things this character in this situation is called to feel, that even when you see the next plot development coming well before it's rounded the corner, you're paying more attention to her than to the story you think you might have seen before. Early on in the film, I found myself wondering exactly why — other than the obvious stylistic appeal — the film was set in Tokyo when it follows a non-Japanese character, and then Winstead's performance made it plain. Kate could be in Tokyo or Vancouver or Dallas, and she'd still feel like an alien, a stranger removed from the wider world by the profession that's defined her life. Winstead's able to play that alienation, that sense of distance, without ever sacrificing Kate's central humanity. It's a stunner of a performance, and one that pushes the film from watchable to gripping. Throw in Martineau's boundless energy as an occasionally quipping, occasionally cursing, always engaging companion, and it all works.

Thanks to Winstead, her chemistry with Martineau, and Nicolas-Troyan's wisdom in never losing sight of the film's core heart, "Kate" rises above the background noise of countless streaming options to become something worth paying attention to. In a career that's covered everything from " Scott Pilgrim vs. The World " to "Fargo," she's proven her mettle as an actor, and thanks to her determined work, this film becomes the showcase she deserves.

"Kate" arrives September 10 on Netflix.

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Kate Parent Guide

The plot twist is predictable but the movie's action sequences are riveting, so that's some compensation..

Netflix: Kate is dead woman walking. Although she's a skilled assassin, a failure on her last mission left her fatally poisoned. She only has 14 hours left...plenty of time for revenge.

Release date September 10, 2021

Run Time: 106 minutes

Get Content Details

The guide to our grades, parent movie review by keith hawkes.

Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has been trained since childhood to be one of the most effective and dangerous assassins in the world. Now working in Japan, she’s become involved with the Yakuza (Japanese organized crime). Under orders from her trainer, Varrick (Woody Harrelson), Kate takes out a leading figure in one of the more notorious Japanese gangs. In retaliation, she’s poisoned with a rare isotope of polonium. With only 24 hours left to live, Kate plots her revenge, but there’s one little problem: She still doesn’t know who’s responsible. And the only person who might know is Ani (Miku Martineau), the daughter of her last target. The clock is ticking…

As a certifiable film snob, I do sometimes get caught up in the minutiae of a film – an inability to see the forest for the trees. This is one of those fun action flicks that focuses so little on the trees, you don’t have a choice but to enjoy the forest. Believe it or not, that’s a good thing. If I’m here for big dumb action fun, directors really don’t need to spend all that much time explaining character backstories to me. Just start shooting.

The action is easily the highlight of the film. Mary Elizabeth Winstead brings a kind of confidence and screen presence that I don’t recall seeing since Sigourney Weaver, and it’s wonderful to watch. Ignoring repeated grisly injuries (and the ongoing effects of severe radiation sickness), Kate kicks a disproportionate amount of Yakuza backside all around the neon-lit streets. It’s hard not to have fun with that.

As with most action thrillers, the major issue here is violence. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody killed with defibrillator paddles to the head before. There’s also the usual deluge of shootings and stabbings, moreso here because of the apparent tendency of Japanese gangsters to carry large knives. Apart from the gore, there’s one very brief sex scene and a healthy smattering of profanity. This isn’t rated “R” for nothing, folks. But that doesn’t mean adult genre fans can’t have a good time – just don’t try any of this at home.

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Keith hawkes, watch the trailer for kate.

Kate Rating & Content Info

Why is Kate rated R? Kate is rated R by the MPAA for strong bloody violence and language throughout.

Violence: People are frequently shot, stabbed, beaten, and cut. Notable incidents include people being poisoned with polonium, killed with defibrillator paddles being applied to the head, and one decapitation. Sexual Content: There is one brief sex scene which contains neither graphic detail nor nudity. Profanity:   There are 31 sexual expletives and 14 scatological terms, along with occasional uses of mild profanities and terms of deity, both in English and Japanese. Alcohol / Drug Use: Adult characters are seen drinking socially. The protagonist is seen taking powerful prescription drugs to counteract poisoning.

Page last updated February 24, 2022

Kate Parents' Guide

What is polonium? How has it been used in the real world? What have the consequences of its use been? What kind of risks does it pose to others?

Related home video titles:

There have been a lot of female assassin movies lately, including The Protégé , Gunpowder Milkshake , Atomic Blonde , Pixie , Anna , Birds of Prey , Vanquish , and The Rhythm Section . Other assassin thrillers include John Wick (and of course, John Wick Chapter Two and John Wick Chapter Three: Parabellum ), The Bourne Identity , The Bourne Supremacy , The Bourne Ultimatum , The Virtuoso , and The Equalizer .

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Prince William Says Kate Middleton Is 'Doing Well' and Shares Update on George, Charlotte and Louis

The Prince of Wales spoke about his family on his final day away

Janine Henni is a Royals Staff Writer for PEOPLE Digital, covering modern monarchies and the world's most famous families. Like Queen Elizabeth, she loves horses and a great tiara moment.

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Prince William shared a positive update about his wife Kate Middleton , who is receiving cancer treatment, during his latest engagement at a hospital.

The Prince of Wales, 41, briefly spoke about Kate and their children Prince George , 10, Princess Charlotte , 9, and Prince Louis , 6, upon arrival at St. Mary's Community Hospital in the Isles of Scilly on Friday, May 10, when a staffer asked about his family.

"May I ask how Princess Kate is doing?" hospital administrator Tracy Smith asked in a video shared by Sky News .

"She's doing well, thank you," the royal replied.

"Lovely, and the children as well?" Smith asked.

"The children are very jealous that I'm here and that they're not here as well," William admitted.

The Isles of Scilly are known to be a favorite getaway for the Prince and Princess of Wales and their kids, and the royal couple has previously been spotted biking around Tresco. Vacationing on the isles off the southwest tip of England continues a tradition for William, as he spent time there as a boy with Princess Diana , King Charles and Prince Harry .

Ben Birchall-WPA Pool/Getty

"Will you bring them later in the year, maybe?" Smith continued, referring to the royal children, and Prince William mentioned that they might spend time there privately.

The island of St. Mary's welcomes about 100,000 visitors each year, and Prince William visited the local hospital to learn more the challenges of providing health care in an island setting and plans for a new integrated health and social care facility set to be built built on nearby land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, the $1 billion estate he inherited upon the death of Queen Elizabeth in September 2022. William's visit to the Isles of Scilly began with a stop at St. Mary's Harbor, where he reportedly picked up pastries for Kate, George, Charlotte and Louis!

"What's selling quickest this morning?" the Prince of Wales asked at On the Quay cafe before buying five Cornish pasties, a savory local treat filled with beef and vegetables.

William also mentioned his children's envy that he was in the Isles of Scilly while speaking with well-wishers at the harbor. The royal revealed that he went for a morning swim and said he wished he could stay longer, but had to get home for his family.

"My family are very upset I'm here without them," he said, the Daily Mail reported. "The children will kill me if I don't go home later."

Friday marks the final leg of Prince William's two-day work trip to southwest England, his first such away since Princess Kate made the public announcement about her health on March 22. William cleared his calendar and postponed forward-facing engagements to be by his wife's side following her announcement, which may have been strategically timed to George, Charlotte and Louis' break from school.

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King Charles' elder son has gradually resumed public duties after his kids were back in the classroom, but a close source tells PEOPLE that William is totally focused on his wife.

"William is prioritizing giving her all the time she needs to get better and the support, particularly to the children," a close source says in this week's exclusive cover story.

"For William, everything hinges on Kate's well-being," adds royal biographer Ingrid Seward, author of My Mother and I .

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Kate Beckinsale, after a ‘rough year’ and hospitalization, returns to the red carpet

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Kate Beckinsale traded in her “Tummy Troubles Survivor” T-shirt for something more glamorous as she made her red carpet return on Thursday.

The English actor appeared at the star-studded King’s Trust Global Gala in New York City, where she wore an abstract strapless gown, white platform heels, a glittery emerald green purse and, atop her head, an oversized black bow. The “Prisoner’s Daughter” star flaunted her fashion after sharing that she was hospitalized for a mysterious health scare in March.

The “Aviator” and “Pearl Harbor” actor also said she turned out for the Thursday gala after “a rough year.” “My parents have both been unwell and my cat ... it’s been a bunch of things,” she told People on the carpet.

Entertainment & Arts

Kate Beckinsale’s ‘Tummy Troubles Survivor’ shirt hints at ailment that hospitalized her

Kate Beckinsale wore a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Tummy Troubles Survivor,’ an apparent reference to the mystery medical issue that hospitalized her in March.

April 17, 2024

“That’s why it’s nice to come and see friends and have a little perspective. Everyone’s had a bit of a rough year, I think,” she added.

Beckinsale did not disclose further details about the ailment that landed her in the hospital in March. In a since-deleted Instagram post, she had announced she was sick and shared a series of photos from her medical-grade bed. She posted the hospital pics months after a separate hospitalization immediately after the Golden Globes in January, also for an undisclosed health scare.

It’s still unclear why the 50-year-old star landed in the hospital in March, but she gave a possible hint in a since-deleted Instagram post in April. She posted a photo of herself , seemingly in the luxe comfort of her home, wearing a T-shirt that read “Tummy Troubles Survivor.” The top also featured an illustration of a bunny in a suit of armor holding a shield and sword.

Thursday wasn’t Beckinsale’s first time attending the King’s Trust Global Gala, she told People. She explained that the event can be “moving and inspiring” when it spotlights the children it seeks to uplift. The trust, established 48 years ago as the Prince’s Trust by King Charles III , seeks to provide employment and education opportunities to at-risk youth, its website says.

Kate Beckinsale visits hospital almost immediately after Golden Globes ceremony

Kate Beckinsale headed for the hospital after the Golden Globes ceremony. Her stepfather, Roy Battersby, was reportedly hospitalized in December.

Jan. 10, 2024

In her People chat, Beckinsale praised the trust’s “important” work. Teyana Taylor, Lionel Richie, Chrissy Teigen, Ashley Graham and Laverne Cox also were among the stars attending the gala Thursday night.

Times staff writer Nardine Saad contributed to this report.

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Alexandra Del Rosario is an entertainment reporter on the Los Angeles Times Fast Break Desk. Before The Times, she was a television reporter at Deadline Hollywood, where she first served as an associate editor. She has written about a wide range of topics including TV ratings, casting and development, video games and AAPI representation. Del Rosario is a UCLA graduate and also worked at the Hollywood Reporter and TheWrap.

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Thelma (2024)

Thelma is a 2024 comedy film written and directed by Josh Margolin. Thelma Post finds herself duped out of money and more when a scam caller pretends to be her grandson. Unwilling to sit back and let herself be a victim, she sets off into the city to find the perpetrator and take back what is hers.

Director Josh Margolin

Release Date January 18, 2024

Studio(s) Bandwagon, Invention Studios, Zurich Avenue

Writers Josh Margolin

Cast Clark Gregg, Fred Hechinger, June Squibb, Richard Roundtree, Parker Posey, Malcolm McDowell

Rating Not Rated

Runtime 97 Minutes

Genres Comedy