"Ghosted" a perfunctory action-comedy-romance with hot but chemistry-free A-listers

Ghosted (2023)

Chris Evans and Ana de Armas are sexy and charismatic together and individually in “Ghosted,” AppleTV+’s bid to keep up with Netflix on star-studded action comedies. Or, that was the plan. These A-listers do show up, indeed, but they can’t just coast and fill in the blanks when the execution of this “OMG, my [blank] is a spy!” premise just lacks style and personality. As a perfunctory, thoroughly disposable action-comedy-romance hybrid, “Ghosted” just constantly reminds one of other, better movies, like it’s a gender-swapped remake of 2010’s purely entertaining “Knight and Day.”

Chris Evans is a lot of things—one of the hottest celebrities out there—but it is difficult to buy him as a single farmer who’s so clingy that he can’t keep a girlfriend. As a result, he feels pretty miscast as Cole, who meets art curator Sadie (Ana de Armas) at a farmers’ market in Washington, D.C.. Their meet-cute banter over houseplants is so strained that it lacks the intended zing. But eventually, their coffee date, a run up the Georgetown steps from “The Exorcist,” and a kiss on the Recreation Pier lead to a night together, resulting in Sadie making it on Cole’s cell phone wallpaper. Evans and de Armas just don’t cook up the fiery or playful chemistry needed to make us care about their will-they-or-won’t-they romance. As the title goes, Sadie then ghosts Cole, and by the encouragement of his parents (a likable but mostly squandered Amy Sedaris and Tate Donovan), he flies to London to find Sadie, based on a tracker on his asthma inhaler which somehow came into her possession (this will never be brought up again). Turns out that Sadie is actually a CIA operative on assignment, and Cole finds himself caught in the crosshairs and possibly compromising the mission. 

In what feels like a for-hire gig by everyone involved, randomly chosen director Dexter Fletcher (2019’s “Rocketman”) and screenwriters Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick (2016's "Deadpool") and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers (2021's "Spider-Man: No Way Home") only come up with the mere concept of a swoony, energetic romp. The pieces all seem to be there, but “Ghosted” is quippy without being sharp and funny, and it has two attractive people without any spark between them. The spy mission doesn’t really matter, so it’s a clothesline on which to hang action sequences. Those action sequences are fun in their staging, whether it be a funky-bus chase along a winding cliffside road in Pakistan or a shoot-out in a rotating restaurant, but they’re either frenetically edited to death, reliant too much on phony green screen, or both. Song choices implemented into the action also couldn’t be more arbitrary and uninspired, like The Knack’s “My Sharona,” Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl,” and Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk.” Were these just songs on the music supervisor’s Spotify playlist?

The idea of Chris Evans as the damsel-in-distress is admittedly amusing. In spy mode, Ana de Armas acquits herself well enough even if she is saddled with a distractingly unconvincing mop on her head. The running joke is that everyone keeps telling these two they need to get a room, and we may have to be told this ad nauseam because we never feel it. Even a female polygraph test reader says the sexual tension between Cole and Sadie is high, but maybe she needs to give herself a polygraph. A heavily accented Adrien Brody is nasty fun to watch as a Big Bad named Leveque, who likes killing people with insects. One scene surprises with a succession of star cameos playing bounty hunters; while it is a mildly amusing gag that keeps building as each of these celebrities pops up and then exits, it’s also audience-pandering that otherwise has nothing to do with the story beyond recognition. A case in which blah and middle-of-the-road are almost worse than being an outright disaster, “Ghosted” is so bland and inconsequential that it doesn’t even feel like a movie was viewed. 

Grade: C

Apple TV+ released “Ghosted” (116 min.) to stream on April 21, 2023.