BEFORE: Woody Harrelson carries over from "The Man from Toronto". I'm suddenly filled with anxiety because I heard "The Flash" wasn't doing well in theaters. I don't know if that's because of the Ezra Miller controversies or if people are just burned out on superheroes and megaverse stuff. But I picked four movies to see in theaters this summer that will make my chain to October possible, and that's one of them. Now I think I may have to see it in a theater tomorrow before it vanishes and doesn't appear on streaming until four months from now. I think the old chain I used to work for still has discount Tuesdays, so perhaps I should address this tomorrow - I was going to wait until Thursday when I planned to be in Manhattan with some spare time, but now I don't think I can afford to wait, not if I want my chain to remain unbroken. I hope I don't regret this - watch, if I go to the movies tomorrow then the film will hang around for another three weeks, but if I DON'T, it will be gone before Friday, I'm thinking. Of course, I could be wrong.
THE PLOT: A jaded assassin assigned to target a yakuza clan has 24 hours to find out who poisoned her to get vengeance before she dies.
AFTER: I'm not sure why Hollywood studios are so obsessed with female assassins - does it go back to "Kill Bill", or further back than that? "La Femme Nikita"? I've also watched "Domino", "Hanna", "Columbiana", "Ava", "Red Sparrow", "Gunpowder Milkshake" and "The 355" in recent years, and they're all riffing off the same theme, playing off this contrast between attractive women with deadly weapons. Now I'm wondering if this is some kind of fetish thing for screenwriters and/or studio executives, it would explain why so many films with similar premises keep getting greenlit. But I'd wager there are more female assassins in movies than there are in real life, just a hunch. Note that I've got two more films with female assassins (hit-women?) coming up in the next month. Clearly a popular trend, male assassins are so last century...
I'm not saying women CAN'T do the job, I'm just thinking that most would prefer not to. It's a tough job with a high chance of getting caught or dying, and I think neither of those are high on the priority list for successful females. Again, just a hunch. The screenwriting stereotypes seem to suggest that this career is best for orphaned girls who start young and get groomed by handlers (mostly male) and that just lends a bit of an unseemly feeling to the concept, doesn't it? So in the end I don't know if the portrayal of women as successful assassins is really a step forward, what does it mean for women to have broken a glass ceiling if the job still exploits them and takes advantage of them to do someone else's dirty work? Real success would be for the women to be handlers, like in "The Man from Toronto" or even running the organization.
Kate is cut from the same cloth as all those other female assassins, but in the mission that opens the film, she's asked to carry out a hit in Osaka while the target is in close proximity to his daughter, and that's something she's got a personal rule against doing. Despite this, she carries out the hit, and then complains to Varrick, her handler, about it later. She also has a night of drinking and sex with a man she meets in a hotel bar - but the next day, something's not right, she's dizzy and she fails to kill her next target, then crashes a car during the high-speed chase that results. In the hospital, she learns that she's got acute radiation sickness, and she makes it her mission to get out of the hospital with a gun and enough stimulants to keep her alive long enough to track down whoever poisoned her.
Kate tracks down Ani (the daughter of the first Yakuza she killed, and the niece of the man she thinks is the one who poisoned her), and uses her as bait to draw out the lead gangster, but naturally there are complications along the way - nothing ever goes as originally planned, so Kate has to fight her way through several groups of gangsters before reaching the level boss - all of this is pretty standard and straight-forward, though the stunt work was all done very well. I think most assassin films I've watched, with male or female leads, feature the main character working their way up the chain until they get to face off with the gangster that they've got a beef with.
I'll stop with the synopsis there, because spoilers, but maybe Kate finds out that there are wheels within wheels and things might be more complicated than she first thought - sure, when you've got 24 hours left to live, it might be possible to track down the person you really want to kill, but then what happens when she finds out the goalposts have been moved? That's going to affect the timeline.
I think I'm calling another Mulligan tonight, because I'm so focused on trying to get to the movies before these films disappear that it's hard for me to focus - also there's too much going on at my first job and nothing at all going on at my second job, so I feel very unbalanced. I'm toggling between stressed and depressed and I need to find a way to shake this off. Later this week I go in to see if I can qualify for that vaccine study, so at least there's something I can focus on.
Also starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Miku Martineau, Tadanobu Asano (last seen in "Midway"), Jun Kunimura (ditto), Michiel Huisman (last seen in "The Guernshy Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Miyavi (last seen in "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil"), Mari Yamamoto, Kazuya Tanabe, Cindy Sirinya Bishop, Amelia Crouch (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Ava Caryofyllis (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Gemma Brooke Allen, Hiroyuki Kobayashi, Koji Nishiyama, Byron Bishop.
RATING: 5 out of 10 claw-based vending machines
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