Here’s a movie that tried so hard to make an entrance, it kinda forgot to make a movie. Ghosted is a classic elevator pitch film: “Ana de Armas is a CIA Agent! Chris Evans is the lovesick normie who follows her to Europe! They both get involved in excitement, espionage, and romance!”
Sure, that would sell, right? What exec wouldn’t take that meeting? Even the producers who make it their goal to win the Palm d’Or would still say: “the two from Knives Out? With romance and spy stuff! I’m in!”
Oh, if it were only that easy to create quality film.
Cole (Evans) is romantically needy. Nobody who looks like Chris Evans is romantically needy, but we’ll just ignore that truism for the moment. Hosting a booth at a farmer’s market, Cole meets Sadie (Armas), who is, if anything, just as attractive as Cole, enough so that they automatically seem right together. Well, up until the point where Cole starts being a dick about flora (which may or may not be his expertise). And just as Cole has blown the moment, we remember that he’s Chris Evans, which means he’ll get another chance like no one else on reality would.
Sadie and Cole have an all day/all night/all fun date and then Sadie disappears and Cole is left wonderin’ how good a brother has to look before he ain’t Ghosted. So … Cole, in an effort to play it cool, does NOT play it cool, because, well, that’s the MO of the romantically needy. But he does discover that Sadie is in London and convinces himself that her failure to return his attention is not related to a lack
of desire to return his attention. Ummmm … ok. So he goes to Europe where a completely different film happens, but this one has spies and guns and evil and stuff.
And Ana de Armas is the kick-ass sooper agent, while Cap’n America here is afraid to shoot anybody.
There are a lot of levels of implausible in this film, but we give Ghosted a break because it is, for the most part, pretty people doing cool things, and we allow any amount of crappy writing to justify pretty people doing cool things. What Ghosted misses is that the cool things in the film aren’t quite cool enough to justify the shoddy direction and iffy character development. I dunno how soon a film needs to get to “stop bickering with each other and fall in love already,” but Ghosted needed to get there sooner.
Ghosted is more fun than the Murder Mystery films, but it’s still not fun enough for me to recommend it. If you want to see Chris Evans in action, any of his Captain America films is better than this one. If you want to see better de Armas in action, well, wasn’t she just in No Time to Die? That one was ok, right? And if you want to see better Evans and de Armas together, well, go see Knives Out again. Ghosted wasn’t torture; it was standard forgettable watch, but I will forget it and and look forward to the next project these guys do instead.
There once was an agent named Sadie
Who acted romantically shady
While her date up and cried
She shot, punched, and spied
It’s ok, cuz she’s still a lady
Rated PG-13, 116 Minutes
Director: Dexter Fletcher
Writer: Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
Genre: The one where Chris Evans and Ana de Armas swap traditional roles
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: If you liked Murder Mystery, this probably better
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: “Stunts do not a movie make”
