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The conspiracy theory on social media, in the weeks leading up to the release of Ghosted on Apple TV+, was that neither of the film’s two leads — Ana de Armas and Chris Evans — was ever in the same room together physically. Such was their visible lack of chemistry. The dissection began after Apple released the film’s first still, and continued even as recently as this week, when a new clip showed De Armas and Evans’ characters racing up the Exorcist stairs midway through a rather epic first date. The theory is nonsense, of course, but just the fact that people would consider it should tell you everything that you need to know about Dexter Fletcher’s romantic action comedy, the latest in a long line of glossy Hollywood productions designed to satisfy the audience’s demand for ‘content’ in the streaming age.
Evans plays Cole, a farmer who dreams of writing a book on agriculture one day. This is exactly the sort of employment situation that you only ever see in romantic comedies — it’s like Joseph Gordon-Levitt being a greeting card writer in (500) Days of Summer, or Deepika Padukone being a fresco artist in the original Love Aaj Kal. De Armas’ Sadie, on the other hand, has a more conventional job. She’s a museum art director, or at least that’s what she tells Cole when they meet cute at a flea market.
Those of you who’ve seen the trailer would know two things. First, it would be improper to have high expectations from this movie, and second, Sadie lied. She isn’t a museum art director after all. As Cole rudely discovers some time later (in a cave clearly made of Styrofoam), Sadie is actually a CIA agent, on a mission to stop a vaguely European criminal mastermind played by Adrien Brody from detonating a biological weapon. Cole, his aw-shucks attitude and angelic face, just became an unnecessary distraction. The specifics are unclear.
But here’s the premise in a nutshell. Cole and Sadie hit it off immediately at the flea market, they go on a blissful Before Sunrise-inspired date, and the next day, she ghosts him. Completely in denial, Cole decides to surprise Sadie in London (after creepily stalking her online and locating her whereabouts using an AirTag). But it is at this point that Ghosted abruptly abandons all pretense of being a rom-com and pivots into gormless action-comedy territory with about as much elegance as Salman Khan trying to nail a dance step.
Despite his considerable charms (in other movies), Evans is clearly miscast as the Average Joe. Unlike most other protagonists in movies of this kind — Mr & Mrs Smith, This Means War, even A Gentleman — Cole has no special skills to speak of. He spends almost the entire movie reacting to whatever the plot throws at him, or being yanked in whatever direction Sadie pulls him. A decade ago, they’d have cast a Seth Rogen or a Jay Baruchel in this role. They would’ve also shot at real locations, and not, as every scene in Ghosted suggests, in an abandoned warehouse.
Even though the action takes Cole and Sadie from Washington DC to London to Pakistan, there’s a distinct flatness to the visual. The scenes in Pakistan, in particular, are just awful to behold. The cultural inaccuracies aside, nothing — not the store fronts, not the landscapes, not the browned up extras — looks real, although De Armas does speak in Urdu and chow down on some chaat at one point. It actually requires special skill to take movie stars as magnetic as these two, and drain them so completely of their considerable charisma.
To put it plainly, it has been rather painful to watch Fletcher go from directing a trio of wonderful feel-good British movies, to becoming a reliable studio hand — he subbed in after Bryan Singer was fired from Bohemian Rhapsody — to now helming one of the most anonymous-looking movies in Apple’s entire library. It is equally disappointing to see Salvatore Totino, who gained prominence as Ron Howard‘s regular cinematographer, now having become Hollywood’s go-to for big-budget movies shot against a green screen.
In fact, it’s not just the uninspired visuals and lifeless storytelling that might leave you wanting for more; there’s a depressing laziness about the whole thing that’s difficult to ignore, and absolutely impossible to forgive. Boring, a little entitled, and staggeringly unintelligent, Ghosted positively pushes you to stop engaging midway, and never think about it ever again.
Ghosted
Director – Dexter Fletcher
Cast – Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody
Rating – 1.5/5
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