Kite

Shishkebab, Meat Slab, it's strange to think that Kite is adapted from an anime, because it's anime qualities are practically non-existent and finishing this movie left me wishing there was a better version of it.

I haven't seen the original Kite, but this version was rather perplexing. It's premise of a dirty cop "helping" his dead partner's drug addicted amnesiac daughter to take down the human trafficking organization that killed her parents isn't a bad one and the twist at the end was a fair surprise, but... it felt really awkward.

I'm immediately at odds with our protagonist being a drug addict, frankly, I think you're effectively handicapping your character when your do that because it makes it way more difficult to relate to her, especially when said drug erases memories and effectively casts her as ignorant against a self-aware background. There are mysteries in this story and the only obstacle is the drugs she's taking. Pretty fricken' dumb. Not only that, but Uncle Samuel L. Jackson seems all too contradictive in his "I swore I'd take care of you" dialog as he casually thrusts a needle full of mind-erasing drug into her body. Nice.

Really, it's one thing to make your protagonist a drug addict, that quality about them has to serve their character in some way, such as it is in House M.D. or even Ink.

Here it's... literally the primary plot device the entire movie rotates around and even without it I think this movie suffers.

I had occasional fondness for the aesthetic beats, both musical and visual, but the entire movie feels... dirty. Not the Dirty Harry kind of dirty, but messy. The movies plagued with the same old same old audiovisual artifacts that are meant to create trippy flashback moments for amnesiac characters, but this seemed like self-indulgence. The movie's obviously not going to drip-feed us new information in this way, that's telegraphed very clearly and confirmed when our character gives up the drugs and immediately remembers a single key detail. All of that dizzying garbled fuss was just a complete waste, it never served any purpose other than to stylize an aspect of the movie that would only seriously come into play once.


On top of that the movie's heavily and selectively desaturated and near the end becomes a challenge to even SEE past how dark it gets.

All this and you still have conspicuous metaphorical dialog delivered in such a way that feels nothing short of melodramatic and this clashes with, yet again, the squibtacular violence which features our protagonist slamming a dildo into a bad guy's mouth so hard that the back of his skull explodes all over the wall behind him.

I dunno, it might be just me, but that doesn't seem very realistic.

And even then, did I read that scene right? Was that a dildo or something else? We've established that she's rockin' explosive bullets in a fancy gun she's got hidden in a mechanical compartment of her bag among other gadgets so was that really a dildo or was that a dildo designed to "blow it's load" so to speak? Was it a trick explosive dildo?

Isn't her entire arsenal smuggled police and military weapons? Are the police arming themselves with dildos now? Seriously, WTF was that?