I understand that Winstead has some star power, but the selling point here is the action and the premise, and it’s all just “content” to Netflix anyway. It can’t help but feel imperialist when you have a white character come on over to another country and just mow down lots of its natives simply because they’re the “henchmen.” That’s not to say that the character Kate or even the film itself is “racist”, but it does hammer home the point that when filmmakers make movies set in other countries, they need to do more than just say “We’re here because it’s cool.” I wholeheartedly agree that Tokyo is a stunning landscape and that the city offers rich and interesting culture, but I constantly found myself wondering why they didn’t simply cast a Japanese actor as Kate. This is Tokyo through a white lens, and the mass hordes of bad guys are all Japanese. Thanks to the excellent lead performance from Mary Elizabeth Winstead, it almost succeeds, but the film is so married to its predictable beats and outcomes that you can’t help but feel like it’s another product designed in the Netflix lab.Īnd yet where I struggle to get past Kate is in its fetishization of Tokyo without really showing any love to its people beyond one or two characters.
Tokyo exists in Kate because it’s stylish and cool, and this film wants to be stylish and cool. The gaijin-perspective (gaijin meaning “foreigner”) doesn’t so much interrogate its outsider status as much as it simply makes the title character an interloper who’s largely indifferent towards her setting beyond wanting a particular soft drink. Kate is the result, and it’s not so much that the film is bad, as much as its approach is discomforting. Extraction was a big hit for Netflix last year, so perhaps it’s not so surprising that its algorithm demanded the need for another film where a white actor who had previously played a superhero travels to a foreign land to murder countless scores of native henchmen, but it’s okay because they’re also protecting a child from that country.
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