Jolt – An Electrifyingly Extraordinary Action Thriller
This jolly, wetly harsh action-comedy doesn’t take itself in the slightest bit seriously, which makes it even more fun, but at the same time it cleverly gloms on to a very zeitgeisty problem in its depiction of female rage and women’s equivocal relationship to their fury. It’s like a Jezebel summary transmuted into fiction, but with way more guns and the darkness appears to the max.
Protagonist Lindy (Kate Beckinsale, often likeable in a tough big sister way, however of whatever character she’s playing) has battled with anger management problems ever since she was a little girl, giving birth to shoved a boy’s face in a plate of birthday cake because he annoyed her. Subsequently stints of trying to put that born-with-it wrath and cortisone-fuelled superhuman courage to good use as a fighter or a bouncer and so forth, she now is exhausted and just wants to quit the urge to slit throats and crush skulls – a desire implied hereby extreme eye close-ups and desaturated fantasy progressions. That’s why she’s seeing a specialist psychiatrist, Dr Munchin (Stanley Tucci), who has established a pervy Pavlovian accessory consisting of various electrodes and battery bags that she can use to deliver a shock to herself – or jolt per the title – to clasp her out of whatever murderous, brutal though she’s having, like a more difficult electric collar she can control.
When a nice accountant (Jai Courtney) she hooks up with via a random date ends up murdered, Lindy decides to use her own set of special skills to discover who killed him. However, that puts her at odds with examining police officers Vicars and Nevin (Bobby Cannavale and Laverne Cox, respectively), a nice double act). Cue lots of back and forth banter between the three, as adequately as the odd session of foreplay fisticuffs between Lindy and Vicars who will become a couple should there be a continuation. Altogether, this is flyweight fun.
The jolt was released on 23 July on Amazon Prime Video.