In shocking news that you’d never have seen coming in a million years, Netflix’s hot new action movie has managed to grab the number one spot on the most-watched list just 24 hours of premiering. We are of course lying with that opening statement, and it’s become par for the course to see the streaming service’s latest splashy offering draw in a huge audience on day one; the real question is how long Kate can stay there.
It’s got all of the ingredients to hang around the Top 10 for a good few days to come, boasting an ass-kicking central performance from Mary Elizabeth Winstead that’s far and away the best thing about the Tokyo-set brawler, while Woody Harrelson and Tadanobu Asano provide the required gravitas in their limited supporting roles.
Unfortunately, Kate isn’t the sum of its own parts, falling into derivative territory far too often when the potential was there to make it stand out from the pack in among a swamped subgenre of R-rated actioners that involve a vengeful and highly trained assassin seeking revenge on the person, people or organization that betrayed them.
At the time of writing, the latest effort from Huntsman: Winter’s War director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan holds a middling Rotten Tomatoes score of 43%. Audiences may have rated it at a substantially higher 63%, but those still aren’t the numbers you’d hope to see from what could have been so much more than a derivative Atomic Wick or John Wick clone, even if the same production company was behind all three.