Occasionally, I watch things that just leave me scratching my head and thinking, "What the HELL?"
Sometimes, if the WTH factor is done well, it makes you think deep thoughts about artistic expression. At other times, it just makes you think, wistfully, about the hour of your life that you'll never get back.
Kite Liberator was one of the latter films.
I saw the first Kite movie a few ...
Occasionally, I watch things that just leave me scratching my head and thinking, "What the HELL?"
Sometimes, if the WTH factor is done well, it makes you think deep thoughts about artistic expression. At other times, it just makes you think, wistfully, about the hour of your life that you'll never get back.
Kite Liberator was one of the latter films.
I saw the first Kite movie a few years ago, and remember it as a brief, graphically-violent story of a schoolgirl super-assassin, her abusive handlers, and her tentative (and doomed) friendship with a fellow teenaged super-assassin. Not all the ends were tied up, but there were some fabulous action sequences, and a definite story arc and so when The End rolled across the screen, I was reasonably satisfied that I'd just seen a fairly complete narrative.
Not so with Kite Liberator, which clocks in at slightly less than an hour, a time constraint you'd think would lead the production company to insist on a tightly-focused story.
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But no, it's actually two vastly different storylines, and the connections between them are extremely slight. One story plays out on the international space station, and concerns an experiment gone horribly awry, resulting in two of the astronauts being mutated into seemingly-unstoppable monsters.
The second storyline involves the daughter of one of the mutated astronauts, who for reasons left unexplained, is the successor to the first Kite super-assassin, and who leads a double life as a shy, awkward schoolgirl by day, and super-ninja assassin chick by night. After much wasted screen time on a storyline about the diner where she waitresses part-time, she's assigned to take out one of the space station monsters, who hitched a ride on the space station's escape capsule and is now apparently rampaging (very discreetly, it seems) around the Odaiba district of Tokyo.
There's a short but exciting confrontation between girl and monster, then a quick veer into a separate gunfight related to the diner, and then, the beginning of a second showdown between the girl and her Monster Daddy..and then the film abruptly ends. In the middle of the scene. Before the fight actually begins.
And just like that, an hour of my life, wasted. And the only question in my mind is...did the production company suddenly run out of money, and were forced to wrap and ship the 75% of a movie that they already had in the can?
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