Mark Reviews Movies: JOLT

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | July 22, 2021

Jolt isn't entirely about its central gimmick, but the movie is mostly about it. The gag, established during a fairly lengthy prologue, is that Lindy (Kate Beckinsale) has a rare mental condition, which basically results in her inability to control her anger. When the anger comes out, though, it emerges with an unstoppable urge to inflict violence.

They tried medication, but it failed. They attempted to put her in the military, but no amount of order or discipline could help the problem. Eventually, they just kept Lindy confined, but a doctor arrived at a "barbaric" and "cruel" solution: Attach a bunch of electrodes to her body, and when the anger starts rising, give her a massive shock.

It worked, at least in containing the urges for violence. The thoughts are still there.

That's the point at which we finally meet Lindy, who is trying to live a normal-enough life while enduring and stifling a lot of rage and violent impulses. Having experienced confinement and a lot of experiments since she was a child, Lindy isn't exactly one for ordinary human interaction, but Dr. Munchin (Stanley Tucci), the psychiatrist who came up with the electrical solution to Lindy's impulse-control problem, thinks it could help even more than the repeated blasts of current into Lindy's body.

To us, this seems unlikely. Upon arriving at a restaurant for a date, Lindy spots a jerk berating a valet. She imagines herself smashing the man's leg with the door of his own car and beating the guy senseless, before pressing the button that sends of a burst of electricity through her body. While on the date, Lindy is beyond-irritated with a particularly rude server, and when she hears the waitress bragging about how awful she was to Lindy's date, our anti-hero lets loose the impulses, slamming the server's head into the wall while the woman sits on the toilet.

Scott Wascha's screenplay continually has to do the math on such things. We don't have to like Lindy, although Beckinsale's tough-as-nails and no-nonsense performance possesses a certain charm, but we do have to see her and her inescapable thoughts in a slightly positive light. Thinking of beating up a jerk mistreating a low-wage worker is understandable. Actually pummeling a server for being rude is a bit less so, but these two acts more or less cancel either other out on the likeability scale. The rest of the movie at least, for the most part, keeps her targets of a much worse variety than anything we've seen Lindy do.

The plot here, which is mostly an excuse for Lindy to get into fights and chases and show off the darker side of her impulse-control issues, involves the guy on that date. He's an accountant named Justin (Jai Courtney), who's nice and doesn't flinch or judge Lindy when he sees all of those electrodes and gets a hint about her mental condition.

He ends up dead, apparently murdered by his sole, criminal client. Lindy follows a trail toward the client, with a bit of help from a sympathetic police detective named Vicars (Bobby Cannavale) and while avoiding the cop's partner Nevin (Laverne Cox), who's convinced Lindy killed the guy who actually made her feel normal for once in her life.

The main gimmick, then, isn't quite as clever and considered as Wascha might believe it to be. Under the circumstances, there's little reason for Lindy to restrain herself via electrical shock, since most of the plot involves her confronting and/or beating up people who know the man she's hunting or who are standing in her way of completing her goal. Lindy is little more than an ordinary action hero within the scheme of this story, and without the element of trying to be "normal," there's little to the character than her capacity to channel her rage and dole out a lot of punishment to an assortment of bad guys.

Some of these action scenes, as overseen by director Tanya Wexler, are somewhat clever or appropriately brutal. A car chase, in which Lindy tries to avoid the two cops while also trying to remember how to drive a manual transmission, is dynamic and a bit amusing, since she's trying to reason with the cops on the phone while avoiding them. The various fights, including one against a simultaneous assault from a trio of henchmen at an underground fight club, show off Lindy's no-holds-barred physicality, and a chase through a hospital is staged somewhat smartly, until a scene involving Lindy tossing some babies puts an uncomfortable punctuation on it (Is the joke that she restrains herself from doing worse to them?).

Aside from the early flashes of dark humor (involving Lindy's fantasies of violence) and pieces of the action, all of this turns out to be fairly routine. Beckinsale makes for a sly, intimidating action anti-hero, but Jolt revolves around a gimmick that the movie constantly works to undermine. As with so many movies these days, this one promises a sequel, so maybe they'll figure out how to marry the gimmick and the plot next time.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products