Beckinsale is a likable protagonist with anger management issues and Stanley Tucci is her psychiatrist in this fun action-comedy
This jolly, wetly violent action-comedy doesn’t take itself in the least bit seriously, which makes it even more fun – but at the same time it cleverly gloms on to a very zeitgeisty issue in its depiction of female rage and women’s ambivalent relationship to their own fury. It’s like a Jezebel article transmuted into fiction, but with way more guns and the sarkiness is turned up to the max.
Protagonist Lindy (Kate Beckinsale, always likable in a tough big sister way, regardless of whatever character she’s playing) has struggled with anger management issues ever since she was a little girl, having shoved a boy’s face in a plate of birthday cake because he annoyed her. After stints of trying to put that born-with-it wrath and cortisone-fuelled superhuman strength to good use as a soldier or a bouncer and so forth, she now is exhausted and just wants to stop the urge to slit throats and crush skulls – a desire signified here by extreme eye close-ups and desaturated fantasy sequences. That’s why she’s seeing a specialist psychiatrist, Dr Munchin (Stanley Tucci), who has created a pervy Pavlovian accessory consisting of various electrodes and battery packs that she can use to deliver a shock to herself – or jolt per the title – to snap her out of whatever murderous, violent thought she’s having, like a more complicated electric collar she can control.