It’s one thing to come up with an awesome-sounding concept for an action movie, but it’s a much tougher proposition to actually deliver on the promise of unbridled ass-kicking insanity. If it wasn’t for star Kate Beckinsale, then there’d be nothing much to recommend about Jolt whatsoever, but her phenomenal performance does its best to try and drag the material up to her level.
A spiritual successor of sorts to Jason Statham’s unhinged Crank duology, Beckinsale’s Lindy Lewis is a bouncer with severe anger management issues, which have gotten so bad that she wears a specialized vest designed to give her an electric shock whenever she feels murderous rage beginning to bubble up inside of her.
Unfortunately, when the first genuine romantic interest of her entire life is murdered, she opts to go on a brutal rampage of revenge to uncover the identity of the killer, leaving a trail of broken bodies in her wake. In an exceedingly rare turn of events that speaks volumes as to Jolt‘s quality, though, critics actually preferred the hyper-violent film to audiences, which is virtually unheard of.
The comparative Rotten Tomatoes scores sit at 40 and 37 percent, but at least Beckinsale managed to escape unscathed as the one aspect of Jolt praised by almost everybody. Being a balls-to-the-wall actioner, of course, it’s always ready to recapture the imagination on streaming, which is exactly what’s happened this weekend.
Per FlixPatrol, the disappointing waste of an A-grade premise has returned to prominence on Prime Video, but the underwhelming reactions mean that sequels almost definitely won’t be happening.