Review of Jolt (2021) by Gaijin- — 05 Aug 2021

SHORT VERSION: Unexpectedly low budget, bad choreography and nonsensical writing make this movie not worth watching. Not even for free. Avoid.

LONG VERSION (may contain some spoilers):

When I watched the trailer I knew this was going to be a story about how evil men are and how righteous it is for a woman to beat them up. It's a fashion trend that's not going away any time soon, so I accepted it. However, I thought that, at least, this could be an entertaining popcorn action movie with good production value: it's got Amazon's money and a good cast... right? Nope.

The whole movie is shot in a set that tries to reproduce an intersection with two or three blocks in each direction, plus a number of indoors locations (most of them one-room, empty). There are no gun fight scenes. The two or three hand to hand combat scenes that are there, are terribly choreographed and shot, with close shots and continuous changes in camera angles to hide what's really happening.

Then there's the writing. The premise of the movie is how the condition that afflicts the main character shapes her life... but you get all her background in a narration dump in the first five minutes. The movie then proceeds to show you her daily life and, for those 15 minutes, you kind of get to sympathize with the character (any sympathy you could have for her vanishes when later in the movie she uses a baby as a human shield, but anyway...). But then we move into the "revenge story" which takes most of the movie. Here's where the writing goes out the window, especially with the main character saying a one-liner after the other, all of them taken from bad comedies from the nineties that do not make any sense. It felt like the writer (whose only credit on IMDB is this film) tried to convey the notion that the main character copes with her condition through humor, but failed miserably at it.

Looking at the few prior credits of the director, it looks like she wanted to make a movie about a girl with a condition trying to have a normal life in a world filled with evil and / or stupid men; but she had to comply with Amazon's mandate to make an action flick, with the additional restriction that most of the budget went into hiring Kate Beckinsale.

Avoid this flick at all costs. Not worth your time; not even for free.