KITE
DIRECTOR: Ralph Ziman
CAST: Samuel L Jackson, India Eisley, Callan McAuliffe, Deon Lotz, Terence Bridgett
CLASSIFICATION: 16V
RUNNING TIME: 90 minutes
RATING: **
Ralph Ziman did a great job on Jerusalema, no wonder he was asked to helm this film, shot in Joburg, at the last minute. Jerusalema displayed a wonderful sense of place and Rapulana Seiphemo gives a nuanced performance as the main character who is either the good guy or the bad guy, depending on your viewpoint. Too bad that experience could not save this a mess of a movie.
Kite is based on a particularly gory anime which relied heavily on gross violence and even worse abuse and was banned in several places because of perceived child pornography.
Set in a dystopian city which locals will recognise as Joburg, Ziman’s version downplays the heavily sexualised content of the original anime, eschewing completely the icky relationship between the main character Sawa and the Akai character who is her guardian.
While this film version still contains gory violence, you become numbed to it very quickly since it is the same basic idea over and over again – Sawa (Eisley) gets close enough to shoot someone at point-blank range and it is gross.
Jackson is Karl Aker, sometime guardian to teenaged Sawa, daughter of his now-deceased cop partner, as it turns out. He is for ever hauling her out of trouble, which she is constantly creating by killing people with the maximum amount of carnage. While the bodies drop and Sawa shoots up some weird drug in order to forget her surroundings, we piece together that she is trying to avenge her parents’ death.
One thing that is telegraphed right from the beginning is that Aker is manipulating Sawa, not only to kill people, but also to serve his own nefarious purpose. The details remain sketchy, but the harmful intent is clear.
Several familiar actors pitch up, affecting a variety of accents and varying states of bewilderment – none of the characters know what is going on, just that people are dying in bloody ways, but who cares, they are all gangsters anyway.
Bridgett pops up eventually as the bad guy in a scenery-chewing moment even more over the top than John Savage in Jahmil Qubeka’s A Town Called Descent (2010), and that is saying something.
While the film flits from one scene to the next, overall the pacing is odd because the story just takes so long to get anywhere. It plods along without heightening the tension, even when a perhaps-friend (played by Aussie actor McAuliffe) perhaps-foe of Sawa’s starts shadowing her and either helping or hindering her efforts.
The smoke machine works overtime, the atmosphere is seedy and depressing and Ziman’s post-whatever-disaster-strikes-you Joburg would be a wonderful setting for Lauren Beukes’ version of Hillbrow in Zoo City.
But, if the film was meant to be a comment on the exploitation of a teenage girl by a manipulative Svengali type as the synopsis insists, it totally misses the point. It doesn’t go serious like The Runaways or deliciously overboard a la Sucker Punch, it never made it onto the boat – Jackson phones in his performance, going through the motions of a cop unsure of the line between good and bad, never exerting himself beyond striking a pose and occasionally menacing whomever steps into the frame. There is absolutely no charm in his performance, so Svengali he ain’t.
There is nothing novel about painting Sawa as a bloodthirsty young woman and as fetishised revenge fantasies go, this one is tame in all the wrong ways.
If you liked Blood: The Last Vampire you will like this.