FiLM REVIEW

from City Pages | Where did all the YP Groups go? | 07.29.21

Jolt: you’ll need one to get through this film

Jolt | Amazon Prime | 91 minutes | R

I had a lot of hopes for Jolt when I first pressed

play on the film in my Amazon account. The premise is pretty interesting: A woman who from a very early age has no filter on her violent tendencies. If someone annoys her, that little voice inside of us all that restrains us from realizing our thoughts in any real way doesn’t exist in Lindy’s brain.

So instead, she wears a suit with wires that gives her a jolt (ha, get it?) of electricity any times she feels such a tendency, controlled by a small handle. Just press the button and all the violence she’s imagining is wiped away.

Of course, this has some holes in it itself. If she has the impulse control to press a button to stop her violent tendancies, couldn’t she just… you know, not do the violent thing? Wouldn’t the shock, which she administers to herself, make her more angry? (This is, by the way, after apparently years of government experimentation in which somehow they don’t realize they should probably restrain her well, stopping her from the crazy number of researchers she maims and kills. But I digress.)

All that aside, I really do think Jolt in the right hands could have been a fascinating movie. With skilled writing and top notch directing, it could have been an amazing thought experiment.

Instead, we get this. And it is not that. Not at all.

What proceeds is instead something that would have been embarrassing on late night television in the 80s. It’s hard to fathom how something like this gets made when even television series have much higher quality.

So the story goes something like this: After montage of her troubled childhood and adolescence, we cut to Lindy (Kate Beckinsale) trying to talk herself into going on a date. She tries to explain to Justin (Jai Courtney) how she’s not ready to go on a date, only for him to win him over with his quiet charm. (Somehow he’s an accountant but built like Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

You can guess how this goes from her. She reluctantly sees him again, falls in love with him, worries he will discover her deep dark secret (someone a violent woman with no impulse control never made the news?) and he does and is cool with it, then he turns up dead.

Since she fell hopelessly in love with him after two dates (or I guess, one and a half, since she left early from the first one?) she of course has to get revenge. Oh and a pair of cops are after her thinking she killed him, which she disuades them by beating them up and leading them on a high-speed car chase?

Yeah, I didn’t get it either.

All that sounds kind of like a The Fast and The Furious movie — not good, but at least entertaining. But Jolt is even worse: it’s just flat out boring. I’m normally not a two-screen person. If I watch a TV show or a movie, I watch it, saving the phone for later. But I found myself on my phone a lot in this film, because it somehow manages to make car chases and violence boring.

Jolt is the worst kind of B movie. It’s not so bad that you can amuse yourself making fun of it. Just bad enough that you wish you were doing something else.

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