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. 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. Cars are outlined in neon like they sped out of Mario Kart. J-pop singers dance in French maid outfits. The first aerial shot of the city is of Tokyo Tower, an Eiffel Tower clone seemingly designed to disorient tourists. Nicolas-Troyan’s Tokyo is a fantasy land. Winstead’s naturalistic performance butts heads with the film’s exaggerated style. 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 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. There’s life in her eyes and exhaustion in her gait.
She wears hoodies and, only somewhat cloyingly, a smiley face shirt purchased from a vending machine when her gear gets covered in gore. Winstead, however, chooses to play Kate as a human being - not some femmebot executioner dressed in latex or pigtails. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Kate is introduced on the most traumatic day of her job. There is only carnage - and to his credit, Nicolas-Troyan (“The Huntsman: Winter’s War”) keeps the hits coming. 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.
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. Yes, she can rack up quite the Schwarzenegger-esque kill count. 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. “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.
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