I had heard a few years ago about the plan to
make Yasuomi Umetsu's 'Kite' into a live action film, and I
must admit that this did not sound like a very good idea to
me. 'Kite', to put it shortly, is the story of a school
girl who spends her days murdering people and her nights
getting gang raped. That's something that probably
shouldn't even be made into the anime it was made into, much
less a live action movie, though I will admit I did enjoy
Umetsu's 'Kite'. Own it even. Hentai scenes
and all. Animation does give one the ability to get away
with certain things that you just can't do with live
action. Regardless, after years of planning and
preproduction and the untimely death of the first director, we
have 'Kite', the live action film. Minus the gang rape,
thank goodness. And… well… it still probably wasn't the
best idea.
The young girl, seemingly completely out of it, is being
dragged up the elevator by some no good individual who looks
like he plans to do some awful things to her once he gets her
up to his room. He's not going to make it. The
girl Sawa (India Eisley) was just playing possum, pulls a
pimped out gun out of her purse and pumps a time delayed
exploding bullet in this guy's head. Not sure what the
exploding bullet is all about, but I guess it does keep a guy
dead. Good start, and it is lining up nicely with the
anime.
Now things begin to get a little confusing and a lot
wayward. Sawa, as it turns out, works for Paris (?)
police officer Karl Aker (Samuel L. Jackson) taking out the
vermin in this post-apocalyptic looking city, trying to claw
her way to a mysterious character known as The Amir. It
seems many years ago this Amir killed Sawa's parents, with her
father being Karl's partner, and Karl has been raising Sawa
ever since, while training her in the fine art of
assassination, and also plying her with this drug she needs
that allows her to forget the awful things she is doing.
So Sawa is going about the business of
killing pedophiles and drug dealers and gun runners, and
getting a little sloppy about it much to Karl's dismay, but
then she meets Oburi (Callan McAuliffe), a young man about
Sawa's age who claims he knew her way back. He also
mentions that she would remember him too if she just get off
that junk she's using to forget everything. More
importantly, she'd remember what actually happened that night
her parents got slaughtered.
A lot of other stuff happens, parkour enables street thugs,
bathroom shootouts, lots of time delayed exploding bullets,
until Sawa finally reaches her ultimate goal. But
naturally, everything isn't always what it seems and the real
truth will hurt Sawa deeply. But hey, at least the city
has fewer pedophile pimps running around. That can't be
an altogether bad thing, now can it?
Unfortunately, after that promising opening scene, nothing
seems to work all that well in director Ralph Ziman's live
action version of 'Kite', and a lot of this, I believe, simply
has to do with a source material that just doesn't translate
all that well to live action. India Eisley is a cute
kid, but there's not a lot that she does in this movie as the
character of Sawa that sells us on her being a kung fu
kicking, master assassin, no matter how many people she shoots
in the head. Again, I think this is less the fault of
the actress and more so the source material translating
poorly. The animation was pretty darned unbelievable as
well, but it was animation and you can really get away with a
lot more on a drawn canvas.
Aside from the fact that we weren't really buying into the
character of Sawa, which is a fairly major issue, the rest of
the movie featured a narrative which was at best a jumbled
mess of ideas that separately, probably sounded really cool,
but stitched together… well… it was a jumbled mess of
ideas. The film had very little rhythm to it, it was
surprisingly slow moving despite all of the action sequences
and strange looking people running and jumping over walls, and
the look of the film was very drab and depressing. Of
course, this is a movie about a teenage girl shooting people
in the head, so we know we weren't going to get a sunny film,
but where our filmmakers may have planned for this color
palette to be 'dark', what we saw was 'drab', 'colorless', and
ultimately boring.
Samuel L. Jackson was in it though. Was does that
mean? Well, not much really since breathing oxygen is
slightly more difficult than getting Samuel L. Jackson to be
in your movie, but we are fans of the man here at the FCU and
he does seem to give it his best shot, in yet another lousy
movie.
'Kite' was probably doomed to fail from the get go.
Removing the gang rape elements was a positive, but we were
still left with a film that felt dead on arrival.
