There’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.
