Jolt (2021)

Jolt arrives as a ninety-minute revenge thriller with a crackling premise and a star who seems contractually obligated to remain in motion. Kate Beckinsale plays Lindy, an ex-bouncer whose intermittent explosive disorder turns minor irritations into property damage, and who is fitted with an electroshock vest that her psychiatrist adjusts like a thermostat. When a man she has gone on precisely one date with turns up dead, she sets about dismantling a criminal enterprise with the enthusiasm of someone finally given permission to stop being polite. Tanya Wexler directs with a neon-soaked efficiency, and the film never pretends to be anything other than a brisk, disposable entertainment.

Regarding the cultural ledger, the film is a modest entry. Laverne Cox appears as a detective, and a Black supporting character exists without the screenplay feeling the need to comment on it, which is the sort of quiet integration that registers as representation only if we squint at the credits. Cox's character is not written as queer, and the film makes no thematic use of her identity. The rage-driven heroine and the woman behind the camera suggest a certain progressive sensibility, though the result plays as genre mechanics, not argument. Lindy's disorder is central, yet it functions as a violent action conceit, a superpower with a co-pay, and the film has no interest in neurodivergence as lived experience. An arms dealer is dispatched as a villain, which is the extent of any economic critique.

The film scores low across the board, and that is not a moral judgment, merely a taxonomic one. Jolt wants nothing more than to be a good time, and it is a mildly buzzed one at that. There is something almost restful about a picture so uninterested in instructing us. The vest runs out of charge. So, eventually, does the movie.