“Kite” (2014) Review

Of all the Japanese animated movies to adapt for a live-action presentation, Kite confuses me. The original source material was a one-hour, over-the-top action romp with ridiculously violent fights and overly graphic sex scenes. So disturbingly pedophelic were these sexual encounters that the general release had to be edited down severely with the “director’s cut” being released under a pornography affiliate. Tracing its inspiration, an obvious suspect would be Luc Besson’s Leon The Professional, a sub-par American remake of Besson’s superior action picture La Femme Nakita. Perhaps the producers of the Kite remake somehow thought that the talent would come full circle.

In reality, it’s a bland mess of an action picture drowned in cliché and confusion. The setting seems to have shifted from Japan to South Africa (never stated, but that’s where it was filmed). The world has just suffered an economic collapse and society has crumbled to a world of flesh cartels and vicious gangs. It seems like a more likely future free of robots and holograms, but most of the setting sounds like the present even without the economic crash. I guess that backdrop makes the abundance of mobsters and nightclubs more acceptable.

Our protagonist is the young vigilante Sawa (India Eisley), fighting her one-woman war against the flesh dealers to avenge her dead parents. She poses as a prostitute in her boldly colored wig and lures the men in with her sexual offerings. But, surprise, she murders them with skill just before they do the deed.

Her weapon of choice is a bulky pistol that fires bullets with a timed explosive charge upon impact. This sounds like it would make for some neat kills, but we never see any of them since she aims directly for the head killing the gangsters instantly.

In the opening scene, Sawa puts a bullet in the brain of her lasted perverted catch of the day in an elevator. The bullet is apparently strong enough to put a baseball-sized hole through the victim’s blocking hand, but not enough to blow away his skull. The music swells as the beeping of the bullet lodged in the corpse grows faster until there is a bloody explosions. This director is actually seeking tension in if a dead body can get deader. The movie never gives us that satisfactory moment where a gangster is wounded by one of these bullets, corners Sawa with a deadly assurance of her demise and loses a limb from the explosion.

But the a-typical mafia men in tacky suits are not the only opponents she has to deal with. There is apparently a roaming gang of feral humans that seem to be lost on their way to the set of Mad Max. They leap and bound from city structures like parkour artists on adrenaline. They travel in packs giving the standard whistle for more of their kind to join in the hunt for money, guns and whatever they can loot off their victims as they brutally beat them to bloody pulps.

Where are the cops in all this? They’re just as corrupted by the crippled economic state. Karl Aker (Samuel L. Jackson) is one such detective working semi-outside the law to give Sawa with plenty of guns and drugs. Her narcotic of choice is known as Amp which is apparently supposed to make you an efficient killer, but also degrade your memory severely. Of course, this clouds her true purpose for avenging her parents which will eventually surface.

Everything about this movie is sloppy from its laughable twists to its poorly edited action sequences to even the sound design. In order to make this vision seem just a tad futuristic, the movie adds these strange synth sounds to the cop car sirens. This sound clashes heavily with the techno soundtrack where you’re not sure if the music is building or if the cops are approaching from the distance. Supposedly, Rob Cohen (Shark Night) was attached to direct, but died before production began and David R Ellis stepped in to direct. Given Rob’s resume, it’s possible he could have delivered a movie that was just as campy as its anime counterpart. What we got instead is a dreary picture that attempts to be dark and bombastic without ever hitting either target.

Lacking in bite, blood and pulp, Kite is a remake doomed to obscurity if not for its bland production than its overuse of clichés. Honestly, how many more cherry-colored bob wigs do I have to see a movie prostitute/assassin wear before this trope is retired. I’ve already seen it used twice in 2014. Somebody please put a bullet in this tired device to put it out of its misery.