Live Action Kite Footage Released

The first trailer and sizzle-reel from director Ralph Ziman, who took over for the late David R. Ellis, has hit the web. The movie is based on creator Yasuomi Umetsu’s 1998 two-episode OVA series A-Kite.

My opinion:
The footage does look like it’s attempting to exhibit some degree of visual style. But ostensibly the most immediately impactful element of Kite was its intense, frenetic, virtually superhuman action. Anime Sawa was robotically efficient. Even in the bathroom scene when plans went to crap (no pun intended), the movement was crisp and fast. In the live action footage, she hesitates, as if giving some sort of dramatic weight to everything. Before the kick to the face. Before pulling the trigger. Before stabbing the bodyguard with knitting needles. Before axe kicking the second bodyguard. The extensive parkour in the trailer feels like a weak attempt to make up for the lack of kinetic action coming from the protagonist. Furthermore, Kite had an omnipresent sexuality. This live action footage dresses Sawa provocatively, begins to depict sex in the elevator, and has Sawa partially strip before sprawling helplessly onto a bed. And none of it feels even remotely sexually dangerous, sensual, or erotic when it absolutely could have had the director(s) wanted to emphasize the sleaze aspect of Kite, which is a theme that’s tremendously important in the original anime. It’s the exploitation that makes Sawa fragile and sympathetic. So removing that from the live-action eliminates an important emotion from the film. The trailer makes me think of Hanna and remember how that film and superior actress Saoirse Ronan got the confused, mechanical teen assassin so right in comparison to the footage in this Kite preview that feels so lifeless and compromised. The full film may end up surprising me, but what I see and feel from this advance footage is strictly mediocre pablum; not terrible enough to inspire venomous ridicule nor good enough to inspire excited anticipation. I can easily envision this becoming the next sibling to the very forgettable 2009 Blood: The Last Vampire live-action movie.