JOLT

There’s a disturbing trend in recent action movies for women to be even more aggressively violent than men, as seen in the Netflix movie GUNPOWDER MILKSHAKE and to a slightly softer extent in BLACK WIDOW. Add in the recent bomb ZOLA as well, as a movie in which the heroine is subjected to sexually degrading situations but survives the experience in the end, making her a feminist hero in many critics’ eyes.

The new Amazon Prime movie JOLT adds to this assortment of films, by starring frequent action hero Kate Beckinsale of the UNDERWORLD film series as Lindy, a woman who was diagnosed as having no control over her violent impulses as a child. She was subjected to many deviant experiments while being held in a mental hospital, but, as an adult, has been set free to live a normal life. However, there’s one major twist. She carries a device that gives her electroshocks if she feels the urge to be violent.

The movie tries to portray some of her outbursts comically, with a few succeeding on that level – such as kicking the person behind her in a yoga class, or aggressively shoving someone in her meditation group. However, Director Tanya Wexler doesn’t know where to draw the line a far greater proportion of the time, with scenes that are just ugly (such as Lindy smashing a woman’s head repeatedly into a bathroom stall wall just for talking too loud on her cellphone).

One night, Lindy meets a man named Justin (Jai Courtney) for dinner, and they sleep together on the first date. Since she manages to just have rough sex without killing him, Lindy considers this progress and reports her delight to her doctor (Stanley Tucci), claiming she’s well on her way to being cured.

Just then, however, Justin turns up dead in a dumpster with two gunshots to his head, and Lindy is left to wonder if she killed him in a fit of rage so severe she’s forgotten her actions. Two cops suspect she’s the killer, and so Lindy goes on a rampage to figure out who killed Justin and clear her name.

Can she pull off this dangerous quest? The answer isn’t as cut and dry as you might expect, but the twist involves having an unexpected resolution that’s too ludicrous to work.

JOLT is devoid of any sense of humanity. It’s just a platform to show people pummeling each other viciously. The plot is pretty thin and races to a conclusion in just over 90 minutes (less than that if you consider credits eat up five minutes of screen time). Thus, while Beckinsale makes for an effectively physical killing machine, and the cast includes some surprisingly solid actors (including Stanley Tucci, Bobby Cannavale as one of the cops on her trail, and Susan Sarandon as the narrator who makes a surprise appearance near the end), JOLT is a shock to the senses in negative, debasing ways with nothing positive to recommend it on any sense of genuine merit. Besides extreme violence, it has many obscenities, explicit sex, lots of lewd dialogue, and some substance abuse.

Media-wise viewers will want to avoid JOLT.