GHOSTED - Mark Reviews Movies

Ghosted, Apple Original Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 20, 2023

Here is yet another action comedy that primarily relies on the talents and charms of its leads. It's a template that the screenwriters of Ghosted—all four of them—know too well, perhaps, because the plot and jokes often feel as if they're half-written, waiting for the cast to fill in the blanks.

The other significant problem, though, is that half of this movie's power couple of stars is miscast. It's difficult for one of the movie's running jokes to function when the butt of the joke isn't aware of that role, refuses to be it, or has been told to ignore it entirely.

That role belongs to Chris Evans, playing Cole Turner, a seemingly ordinary guy who is a nerd about history and agriculture, lives with his parents on the family farm, and uses an inhaler exactly one time so that the plot can be set in motion. In theory, Cole is meant to be a man who is completely in over his head and unsuited for all of the action in which he's about to become involved. The issue is that director Dexter Fletcher has cast Evans, a man most famously known for playing the most all-American of superheroes and who probably couldn't look unfit for action without a significant change in his diet and/or exercise regimen. That's good for him, obviously. It's completely wrong for this character and the very basic dynamic that the movie wants to employ.

That dynamic begins when Cole meets Sadie Rhodes (Ana de Armas) while working at a farmers' market in Washington, D.C. When she and Cole start arguing about the maintenance of a houseplant Sadie wants to buy, he's led to believe that there was a lot of sexual tension beneath the bickering, so he asks her out for coffee. Sadie accepts.

We have to cut to the chase a bit here, because none of the pair's getting-to-know-you stuff really matters, except to show that Sadie is adventurous and Cole lies about being the same way to impress her. It works. Really, he's meant to be sort of pathetic, taking a photo of the two of them in bed while Sadie is sleeping (a very creepy move that solidifies the character Evans isn't playing and that the movie wants to avoid), texting her non-stop for days after their rendezvous, and, after checking on the plot device inhaler with a tracker on it, booking a flight to find Sadie in London for a grand romantic gesture that finalizes how very, very incompetent this guy is supposed to be.

Anyway, Sadie turns out to be a CIA agent, and after Cole is mistaken for a spy and almost tortured for a passcode to a MacGuffin and rescued by Sadie, the two are stuck together in Pakistan and other places. They have to survive bounty hunters hired by and henchmen of the villainous Leveque (Adrien Brody), who has some world-ending threat in a convenient briefcase and believes Cole has the code to open said case.

Yes, the plot is as formulaic as that, which shouldn't and wouldn't be much an issue, as long as the action, the jokes, and the performances work to some degree that compensates for the routine nature of the story. Very little about those elements does work to much of a degree, though.

De Armas, for example, is believable as the super spy, and at least some of the action—a chase involving a big bus on narrow mountainside road, a close-quarters brawl in a private jet, a lot of chaos in a rotating restaurant—is based on a neat idea and has some momentum to it. As for the jokes, it's mostly a lot of Cole and Sadie bickering about whatever has just happened or how very different they are as people, but someone also calls in some favors for several cameos, including a string of bounty hunters played by famous folks who pick off each other one by one. The gag is amusing on a basic level, but the cameos end up being more of a distraction that throws off the rhythm of the sequence (just as a random appearance from another movie star stops the climactic shootout dead in its tracks for a payoff that's barely set up in the first place).

It's important to bring all of this up, if only to note the movie's problems don't entirely belong to Evans. He's simply the wrong man for this particular job that requires someone we believe could be in peril in these situations and out of his league with his co-star. Ghosted needs that dynamic for the fundamental premise of the story and the central joke to function. Without it, the whole affair collapses.

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