REVIEW: Ghosted (2023, dir. Dexter Fletcher)

WHO’S IN GHOSTED?

Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Mike Moh, Tim Blake Nelson, Marwan Kenzari, Anna Deavere Smith, Lizze Broadway, Mustafa Shakir, Tiya Sircar, Amy Sedaris, Tate Donovan, Scott Vogel, Burn Gorman, Fahim Fazil, Marisol Correa, Gina Jun, Victoria Kelleher, Sasha Go, Bailey MB, Daniel Eghan

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Dexter Fletcher (director), Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (writers, producers), Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers (writers), Jules Daly, David Ellison, Chris Evans, Dana Goldberg and Don Granger (producers), Salvatore Totino (cinematographer), Chris Lebenzon, Jim May and Josh Schaeffer (editors)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A romantic (Evans) discovers that his new lover (de Armas) is a secret agent…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON GHOSTED?

As much as streaming has really become a major new way to distribute media to the masses, there’s still a code in desperate need of cracking when it comes to film content. There are definitely some winners among the crop (figuratively and literally, with some going on to win some Oscars), but the larger-scale fare such as Netflix’s Red Notice and The Gray Man has thus far been all flash and no real substance, with A-list stars and astronomical budgets doing very little to make up for derivative scripts that often seem like they were written by pure algorithms rather than actual humans.

Now, with director Dexter Fletcher’s Ghosted, it’s Apple TV+’s turn to show the world that it, too, is capable of big-budget romps with little to show for it other than an overwhelming sense of mediocrity.

The film begins as Cole (Chris Evans), an agriculturist making his living on his family’s farm, meets Sadie (Ana de Armas) at a farmer’s market, and the two end up spontaneously spending a romantic day together, before parting ways the next morning. However, all of Cole’s texts to her afterwards are left un-responded to, but rather than accept he’s been ghosted, he tracks her down in London – don’t ask how, it’s honestly a really dumb plot device – only to suddenly be kidnapped and tortured by men who believe him to be an elusive figure known as the “Taxman”. That identity turns out to belong to Sadie, who is actually a CIA agent on an international mission to retrieve a biological weapon from the hands of French arms dealer Leveque (Adrien Brody), and both she and Cole are forced on a journey that could save the world, so long as they get over their new trust issues with each other first.

It’s hardly a new concept to start things off as a mere romance only for things to take a different turn into espionage territory – off the top of my head, I can recall similar, if not near-identical, plots in Knight and Day, True Lies, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and even that largely-forgotten Ashton Kutcher movie Killers – but what hurts Ghosted more than most of those other films is the fact that it’s simply done without half as much passion. Fletcher, who has proven to be a rather lively director with films like Rocketman, Sunshine on Leith and Eddie the Eagle, is merely a guy-for-hire here, executing scenes competently but without much flare or sense of style; it’s a film that feels like it could have been directed by just about anyone, and they just happened to get Dexter Fletcher to fill this particular void.

It hardy makes a difference, because the script – credited to no fewer than four writers, including Zombieland and Deadpool duo Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers who had worked on the MCU Spider-Man movies – is unengaging, derivative, and contrived to the point of near-complete incoherence. It isn’t just that so many plot elements here, from the sharp-suited villains to the MacGuffin that’s almost always some kind of biological weapon in this type of movie, have been done over and over again, but also that none of these writers ever really find a way to make them feel fresh or exciting, and just lean hard into the familiar conventions with very few deviations.

It’s also one of those plots that feels like it was made up as they went along, introducing new things out of nowhere just to prolong the action instead of doing something simple that would solve everything in an instant. It makes it hard to really determine what the ultimate goal is for both the heroes and the villains, because so much keeps getting added on top of an already full pile that is one or two sudden revelations away from toppling the whole thing down.

Most of all, though, none of it is ever worth caring about, especially because – in a crucial blow – the leads aren’t very good together. Chris Evans and Ana de Armas have acted opposite each other before and have done just fine, but there’s something about their pairing here that just doesn’t feel right, and not just because de Armas was a last-minute replacement for Scarlett Johansson (though, again, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference if she didn’t depart due to scheduling conflicts).

Part of that comes down to Evans feeling somewhat miscast as a character who’s supposed to be this unassuming hopeless romantic that gets dragged into this globe-trotting spy thriller, but Evans is physically far from the kind of average schlub that they’re clearly writing him as, and as apt as the actor is with more comedic material he just comes across as false when trying to charm his co-star with knowledge about agriculture and plant life.

De Armas fares slightly better, holding her own in most action sequences and carrying a genuine sense of screen presence, but she’s given little to work with outside of shooting at people and bickering with Evans, with whom the chemistry just doesn’t fizzle because neither of their characters are interesting or even charming enough to get you invested in their romance, nor in the mission that they have to complete. You’re mostly just watching two very handsome actors recite their rehearsed lines without trying to make something spark between them, and whether it’s lazy writing or indifferent direction these otherwise talented individuals deserve much more.

It’s a connect-the-dots movie, derived from a formulaic screenplay that lets the viewer do all the work rather than the other way around, and with few actual moments of genuine suspense or comedy to keep things moving (the one amusing sequence in the whole movie involves a series of uncredited cameos by some recognisable faces, but even that concept is sullied later on with one big-name cameo that comes right in the middle of a big action set-piece and stops everything just to do their regular schtick).

That seems to be the main pattern with all these big-budget movies commissioned by streaming services; they are so concerned with the appearance of an all-out blockbuster, such as attaching A-list talent and adding a global scale to the filmmaking, that they forget that what makes a true blockbuster is a winning concept, good characters, and actual passion for the craft – that, and also actually putting them out in cinemas rather than at home with unpredictable Wi-Fi connections.

Sadly, Ghosted is proof that the streamers are yet to really learn that valuable lesson about putting audiences over budgets.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Ghosted is a flat and unengaging action-romance that suffers greatly from a derivative and convoluted script, autopilot filmmaking, and a noticeable lack of chemistry between its two A-list stars.