“Jolt,” a Kate Beckinsale-fronted actioner helmed by “Buffaloed” director Tanya Wexler, is a film that knows what it is and owns its sense of innate disposability. There is always plenty of fun to be had with a rock-solid piece of disposable mainstream entertainment (it is still summer movie season, after all), and while it’s also undeniably fun to see Beckinsale, normally cast in more purportedly “respectable” roles, kicking all sorts of ass in her very own “John Wick,” it’s also not hard to wish that “Jolt” itself didn’t crackle with more lived-in electricity of its own.
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Even more so than ‘Wick,’ the obvious comparison with “Jolt” – the story of a troubled woman with serious rage issues who learns to curb her murderous anger with the help of a custom-fitted electro-shock vest designed by her “bald and burnished” psychiatrist (Stanley Tucci) – is Neveldine/Taylor’s “Crank,” and not just because jumper cables figure into both films (in “Crank,” Jason Statham attempts to use a jumper cable on his own tongue, in “Jolt,” Beckinsale uses said cables to torture a gangster by affixing them to his… well, you’ll see). There’s also a bit of “Atomic Blonde” in this new movie’s lurid pop lighting and muscular fight choreography. Still, both those earlier, above-mentioned flicks, it must be said, are willing to go there in ways that this brisk but forgettable popcorn item seems reticent to do.
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The early scenes of “Jolt,” filled with Zack Snyder-style slow-mo and glib, omniscient voiceover, introduce us to Beckinsale’s protagonist, Lindy Lewis. We first meet Lindy as a troubled kid: in the first ten minutes, we see her shoving another youngster’s head into a plate of cake, beating yet another kid with a baseball bat, chasing down bullies twice her size with a stick, assaulting a doctor, and kicking a hospital orderly in the testicles (really, no one’s balls are safe in this movie). The diagnosis? Lindy suffers from something called “intermittent explosive disorder,” a condition that results in spasmodic explosions of fury, meaning the poor girl is a liability to practically everyone around her.
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Flash-forward to the present day, and Lindy is, well, Kate Beckinsale: chic and possessed and constantly suppressing the everyday urge to smash in the face of every abusive jerk she encounters (unsurprisingly, said demographic includes many dudes). Lindy’s abrasive edges begin to soften when she finds herself on a date with a self-described “lame-ass accountant” named Justin, played an amusingly square Jai Courtney, cast wildly against type. Against the odds, the two hit it off. She doesn’t like people who chew too loud or wear jeans with flip-flops; he despises people who talk in elevators and/or say, “have a nice day.” After their second date, the lovebirds have already hopped in bed together, so it comes as a grisly surprise to Lindy (not so much the audience) when we learn that not only has Justin been shot to death, but two bickering detectives (Bobby Cannavale and Laverne Cox) seem to be taking an unwelcome interest in her.
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This prototypical neo-noir setup – hardened protagonist falls into bed with a stranger, only to wake up the following morning to be framed for their death – is an interesting one, but the filmmakers never commit to fleshing it out, and thus, it mostly just exists as a springboard for an uninteresting murder-mystery subplot that doesn’t take the film anywhere meaningful. It certainly doesn’t help that Cannavale and Cox, both marvelous performers who are sorely under-utilized here, are saddled with what is unquestionably the movie’s worst dialogue: strained buddy-cop banter that’s deeply unfunny when it isn’t just auto-generated white noise (“sometimes common sense trumps protocol” is something someone actually says in this movie).
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Beyond the eyebrow-raising question of whether or not Kate Beckinsale would throw herself into a fray of balletic violence to avenge the death of Jai Courtney, “Jolt” isn’t designed to do much more than help you kill time at home. Beckinsale and Courtney don’t possess much in the way of chemistry, but they sell what the screenplay asks them to sell with aplomb, even when said screenplay includes lines such as this one: “Penis is not gonna fix me, Dr. Freud” (woof). The idea of a heroine whose emotional spectrum is generally limited to rage or annoyance being forced to reckon with love for the first time is an intriguing one, but what it translates to is yet another arc about a one-dimensionally tough female ass-kicker who just needs to work things out with her hunky boyfriend.
It’s a tough sell, particularly because we never really get the sense that Lindy cares about Justin’s death so much as she needs an outlet for her unquenchable bloodlust. The sense of frenzy and colorful chaos that informs something like “Crank” and its superior, brain-dead sequel feels curiously dialed-down here, which is a strange thing to say about a movie where Kate Beckinsale throws several newborn babies at a cop who has a gun aimed squarely at her head.
While “Jolt” largely fades from memory after watching it, it’s also a difficult movie to dislike. Wexler’s film is breezy, self-aware, occasionally quite funny, and without its end credits, it runs a tight 83 minutes. The filmmaking on display here is clipped and agreeably concise, executed in a montage-heavy style that keeps things feeling brisk and energized. “Jolt” is also not as lazily algorithmic in its makeup as something like “The Tomorrow War,” another recent, Amazon-distributed tentpole. Still, sadly, it’s also just not the legitimately terrific action vehicle that someone like Kate Beckinsale deserves. [C+]
