Mary Elizabeth Winstead has a long history of being very cool in very cool projects, and if you just want to tick off the recent examples you still have her playing Huntress in Birds of Prey and the perfectly named Nikki Swango in the third season of Fargo. So if you wanted to make a movie about, say, to choose an example at random, a ruthless criminal operative who is irreversibly poisoned and has less than 24 hours to exact revenge on her enemies while forming an unexpected bond with the daughter of one of her past victims, you can do a lot worse than casting her in that role. In an unrelated matter, let’s quickly check the logline for her upcoming Netflix movie, Kate.
After she’s irreversibly poisoned, a ruthless criminal operative has less than 24 hours to exact revenge on her enemies and in the process forms an unexpected bond with the daughter of one of her past victims.
Well, that worked out pretty well.
The movie has actually been in development for about two years now, with Winstead and co-star Woody Harrelson both signing on way back in 2019. So their involvement is not exactly breaking news here. The reason we’re talking about it today, in 2021, is because Netflix just released the first images of Winstead in the movie and Holy Toledo does she look cool as hell. Look at the picture at the top of this post. And look at this one, too.
And this one.
Now, some of you are probably still held up on that logline, thinking, perhaps, “Hmm, but isn’t this almost exactly the plot of the 2006 Jason Statham film Crank, in which he too is pumped full of toxins and hellbent on revenge, but this time with Mary Elizabeth Winstead running around the streets of Tokyo with a cigarette dangling from her mouth and a huge honking firearm in her hand and Woody Harrelson involved somehow as some as-yet-unidentified figure who is, one assumes, either assisting her on her quest or being hunted by her? Doesn’t this sound kind of like that?”
To which I would reply, “Yes. It sounds almost exactly like that. And what’s your complaint with any of it?” Because I just re-read all the words I typed and looked at all the pictures again and, buddy, it all seems pretty okay to me.