I know movies require a lot of hard work. They’re a collaborative effort where a major production requires hundreds if not thousands of people working towards a single artistic effort. And yet watching a film like Jolt, it feels like everyone, from the director down to the production assistant is just phoning it in because the premise is silly, everyone’s getting paid, and the film will make no demands of its audience whatsoever. There’s nothing particularly bold about Tanya Wexler’s action-comedy. It’s a film that improves when it gets silly, but too often would prefer to be bitingly sarcastic and sardonic, which doesn’t really work with its outlandish setup and Wexler’s kinetic direction. What you’re left with is a movie that just kind of happens; an action film when you don’t feel like re-watching any of your favorites and you have about 90 minutes to kill so you may as well play something in the background that has minimal plot but style to spare.
Lindy Lewis (Kate Beckinsale) grew up with a bad childhood and worse mental condition. She has “an excess of cortisol”, which causes her to react with violent rage at even the slightest transgression. She’s tried everything to keep her anger in check, but the only thing that seems to work is a self-administered shock treatment where Lindy is rigged with a vest that straps a bunch of electrodes to her body, and she can press a button to give herself a jolt to calm down her violent impulses. However, when Justin (Jai Courtney), a sweet guy she had just started dating, is murdered, Lindy takes it upon herself to find the killers and exact revenge, which she’s well-suited to do thanks to her condition, which in addition to causing violent rage, also makes her stronger and faster for…reasons. As weary cops Vicars (Bobby Cannavale) and Nevin (Laverne Cox) try to stop Lindy’s vengeance, she works her way towards those responsible for Justin’s death.
Jolt is the kind of movie that Beckinsale is just up to now that they’ve apparently stopped making Underworld sequels. She still gets to be an action hero with a dark side, but the plot always stresses that Lindy isn’t a sadist even if she constantly has violent ideation that sometimes leads to ideation becoming realization. Some may get a kick out of Lindy’s dark fantasies, but the weird thing about Jolt is just how quickly it becomes tedious to where it feels like it’s burned off all its energy by the end of the first half hour and there’s till an hour left to go. A better film with a similar premise (see Crank: High Voltage) would understand that in order for Jolt to hold its audience’s attention, it would need to escalate the stakes and find a way to push its lunacy further. Instead, the film frequently drags even when it’s going on a car chase or Lindy’s running through a hospital. The only time the film finds a spark is when Lindy, as an act of distraction, needs to toss a newborn baby so her pursuer will catch it. If Jolt were constantly operating at the level of “baby tossing”, it would have the mad energy to propel it forward. Instead, it’s a frequently listless picture that never takes advantage of its cast or its wild premise.
And yet I’m sure there’s probably an audience for Jolt when you consider that sometimes streaming movies aren’t real movies. They may have been made with the same (or at least similar) effort as real movies, and they’re distributed on a platform with real movies, but my experience with Jolt was never “This was made to be watched,” as much as, “This was made to be played,” and the difference is that Jolt is so generic and obvious that it feels more like filler for the Amazon Prime Video platform rather than something that you would ever encourage a person to watch. There have always been B-movies and films that were made cheaply and quickly, but Jolt feels like it’s part of a new era where it’s not meant to be seen as much as played in the background, something that holds your attention in 5-10 minute spurts rather than a cohesive story with worthwhile characters.
I don’t want to give Jolt too much credit and say it signals the downfall of cinema or anything so grandiose. Rather, it feels like the evolution of films made cheaply, quickly, and easily. This is certainly nothing new, especially in the age of VOD and then Netflix, but as streamers seek to grow their libraries, you’re going to get movies like Jolt that lure you in with actors you like, a good premise, and then you see that there’s really nothing there. But by the time you make that discovery, the remote is so far away, and so you may as well just hop on your phone, and let it unfold in the background as you occasionally glance up at Kate Beckinsale beating a guy up or catching a glimpse of Stanley Tucci and wondering what he’s doing in this movie.
Rating: D+