Tanya Wexler’s Prime Video film hands Kate Beckinsale a high-concept premise — a woman who has to electrocute herself to stay calm — and surrounds her with Stanley Tucci, Bobby Cannavale, Laverne Cox and a late, scene-setting Susan Sarandon.

Lindy Lewis has a problem that most action heroines would list as a job qualification: she cannot control her temper. In Jolt, the action comedy Tanya Wexler directed for Amazon Studios from a screenplay by Scott Wascha, that temper has a clinical name, intermittent explosive disorder, and a homemade cure. Kate Beckinsale plays Lindy, a former bouncer who goes through life wired into an electrode vest designed by her psychiatrist, a device she triggers to shock herself whenever an irritating stranger pushes her toward violence. The film arrived on Prime Video on July 23, 2021, and runs about an hour and a half.

The setup is efficient. The vest is losing its effect, and Lindy’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ivan Munchin, played by Stanley Tucci, suggests a different kind of therapy: try letting someone in. Against her own instincts she goes on a date with Justin, an accountant played by Jai Courtney, and it goes well, well enough that a second date is planned. Before it can happen, Justin is found murdered. The police treat the case as one more file on the pile; Lindy treats it as a personal assignment. The rest of the story follows her as she pulls on every thread that might lead to the killer, while two detectives try to work out whether she is a witness, a suspect or simply a hazard to everyone around her.

Those detectives are Vicars and Nevin, played by Bobby Cannavale and Laverne Cox, and they divide the job of chasing her between them: one increasingly drawn to Lindy, the other determined to stop her before somebody else gets hurt. The trail runs from a dead man’s belongings, lifted out of a police evidence room, and a hacker hired to open his phone, up to a wealthy businessman, Gareth Fizal, played by David Bradley, and his head of security, Delacroix, played by Ori Pfeffer. It is a deliberately simple revenge ladder, each rung a new antagonist and each encounter a test of how long the vest can hold her back, and Wascha’s script keeps a couple of turns in reserve for the last act that are better left for the viewer to find.

A premise built around a switch

The hook is easy to describe, which is part of its appeal. Action cinema has spent decades building heroes whose rage is the engine of the plot; Jolt makes the rage a liability and hands its heroine a literal off switch. The most obvious relative is Crank, the 2006 Jason Statham vehicle in which a poisoned hitman has to keep his adrenaline up to stay alive. Wascha’s script runs the same idea in reverse: Lindy needs a jolt to bring herself down, and every time she reaches for the trigger the story gets a built-in gauge of how close she is to the edge.

That gauge is the cleverest piece of engineering in the screenplay, because it turns a character trait into a mechanism the plot can play with. A vest that stops working, a vest that gets confiscated, a vest that someone else might be able to control: each of those is a complication that grows straight out of the premise rather than being bolted on from outside. Intermittent explosive disorder is a real diagnosis, but a story that treats it with an electroshock harness is plainly after genre fuel rather than clinical accuracy, and the film pitches its idea as a comic-book device, not a case study.

Tanya Wexler moves into action

Jolt was a change of lane for its director. Tanya Wexler came up in American independent film with Finding North and Ball in the House, and reached a wider audience with Hysteria in 2011, a period comedy set in Victorian London about the invention of the electromechanical vibrator, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Hugh Dancy. Her next feature, Buffaloed, starred Zoey Deutch as a fast-talking hustler working her way through the debt-collection business in Buffalo, New York. Jolt, made right after it, is her first action film.

There is a curious line connecting the two most visible titles on that list. Hysteria is about doctors inventing a medical device to manage women their era considered unmanageable; Jolt is about a woman strapped into a medical device for very much the same reason, except that this time she is the one holding the trigger. Whether or not Wexler saw it that way, the overlap gives the new film a slightly more pointed edge than the usual revenge setup, and it fits a filmography built around women who are told to calm down and decline to.

The project came together quickly. Kate Beckinsale was announced in the lead in April 2019, with Wexler directing Wascha’s screenplay for Millennium Media, the independent outfit behind The Expendables and the Has Fallen films. Bobby Cannavale, Laverne Cox, Stanley Tucci and Jai Courtney joined that July, and principal photography began the same month; the end credits list Bulgaria and the United Kingdom as shooting locations. The film then sat through the pandemic before Amazon released it straight to streaming in the summer of 2021, at a time when a large share of mid-budget action titles were skipping cinemas altogether.

Kate Beckinsale and a long action career

For Beckinsale the role sits where her two careers meet. She started in British literary adaptations, from Kenneth Branagh‘s Much Ado About Nothing to Cold Comfort Farm and a television Emma, and has twice worked with Whit Stillman, on The Last Days of Disco and the Jane Austen comedy Love & Friendship. In parallel she became one of the more durable action leads of the 2000s through Underworld, playing the vampire warrior Selene across the franchise, alongside Pearl Harbor and Van Helsing. Jolt asks for both skill sets at once: the physical work of a fight-heavy action film and the dry, deadpan timing of her comedies. It also continued a relationship with Amazon that had begun with the thriller series The Widow, and that she picked up again later with Canary Black.

The supporting cast is unusually stacked for a film of this size. Stanley Tucci, whose range runs from Big Night to The Devil Wears Prada and The Hunger Games, plays the doctor who built Lindy’s vest. Bobby Cannavale, an Emmy winner for Boardwalk Empire, and Laverne Cox, best known for Orange Is the New Black, play the two detectives. Jai Courtney, whose credits include A Good Day to Die Hard and Suicide Squad, is the date who sets everything in motion, and David Bradley, Argus Filch in the Harry Potter films and Walder Frey in Game of Thrones, plays the businessman at the top of Lindy’s list. Susan Sarandon, an Academy Award winner for Dead Man Walking, turns up late in a role credited only as the Woman with No Name.

Where it sits in the genre

Jolt belongs to a wave of female-led action films that gathered pace after Atomic Blonde in 2017 and carried on through Peppermint, Ava and The Old Guard. The summer of 2021 was especially crowded: it reached Prime Video within weeks of Gunpowder Milkshake and a couple of months ahead of Kate, both of them built around female assassins carving their way through a criminal underworld. What separates Jolt from that company is the comedy. Its contemporaries mostly play revenge straight; Wexler and Wascha pitch theirs as a black comedy in which the heroine’s biggest obstacle is often her own temper rather than the villains.

That mix is also where the film divided opinion when it came out. Mixing broad comedy, a murder plot and a medical gimmick in roughly ninety minutes leaves little room for any one of those elements to settle, and the response at release tended to praise Beckinsale’s commitment and the strength of the premise while questioning how far the script developed either. It is a familiar fate for high-concept action: the idea that sells the film is also the yardstick it gets measured against.

An ending that leaves the door open

The final stretch makes no secret of its ambitions. Without giving away the turns that precede it, the closing scenes introduce Sarandon’s character, a figure who seems to know far more about Lindy’s treatment than Lindy does, and who arrives with an offer rather than a threat. It is the kind of ending that reads as a pilot for a larger story, with Lindy repositioned from lone avenger to potential recruit, and it explains why Millennium cast an actor of Sarandon’s standing in a small, late role.

Whether Jolt works for any given viewer probably depends on how much they want from a premise like this one. Taken as a showcase for Beckinsale in a role that uses both her action pedigree and her comic timing, and as a compact genre piece with a gimmick that a lot of bigger films would envy, it has a clear identity. Taken as a study of anger, or as a thriller whose twists have to bear real weight, it is working with less. The vest, at least, remains a good idea, and the film’s last word suggests its makers thought there was more voltage left in it.