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In 2023, it’s increasingly rare to get a fun sub-two-hour film that has two legit movie stars in it. Ghosted, the latest film from Dexter Fletcher is a fun, run-of-the-mill action flick that entertains as much as it panders to the action genre tropes.
Ghosted review
Ghosted references The Beatles’ “Taxman” on a number of occasions, but this film begins akin to the story of another Fab Four classic, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” Cole (Chris Evans) is a farm boy living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. with his parents and younger sister who has yet to live his own life — he claims living at home is due to his parents “needing him” and is the kind of guy who puts trackers on everything from his cash box to his inhaler. Somehow, Evans being a farmer is not nearly the most unrealistic part of this movie.
On one fateful afternoon, while working a stand at the local farmer’s market, he meets Sadie (Ana de Armas), an “art curator” dealing with the loss of a co-worker and who’s being told to make “no big moves” after both ending a relationship and losing said co-worker in the recent months. But this first encounter is a “meet cute” gone wrong, and after arguing over Cole's morality as it relates to plants, it takes a fellow farmer to tell him that there was “serious sexual tension” — something the film has a tendency to remind you of on a number of occasions — between the two and that he needs to go and follow up with her.
The two spend a day together, looking at art museums and peeling back the layers on both of them. Sadie is a guarded person who's not afraid of anything, while Cole can't get on stage for Rockaoke. But upon being ghosted by Sadie (apparently sending a bevy of texts is a trope of films written by Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna, who co-wrote the script with another duo, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, after Peter Parker did the same in Spider-Man: Homecoming to Happy Hogan), Cole takes it upon himself to finally leave the country for the first time and follow her via one of his trackers to London. That’s when Cole learns that Sadie is more than the person he thought he knew, and he gets roped into an adventure and is forced to live for once.
Dexter Fletcher has directed both a so-so entry into the music biopic genre, Bohemian Rhapsody (though he was a replacement director so perhaps that's not all on him), and also the gold standard for the genre, Rocketman. He’s a steady hand behind the camera — just watch his episodes of The Offer — and does have a clear love for the '80s and films like When Harry Met Sally and Indiana Jones. You can see the inspiration from both of those films all over Ghosted, and for someone who hasn’t directed something of this scale before, he does a fine job.
Simply put, they don’t make movies like Ghosted anymore — furthering the appreciation of the film. The '90s and early 2000s were the apex of a mid-budget action-comedy with two bankable stars in the leads. Sure, 2022 was the year of the rom-com — Ticket to Paradise is great — but the closest recent film akin to this is The Lost City, and Ghosted blows that out of the water.
Here, you have two more mainstream stars with more name value in 2023 than the likes of Sandra Bullock — who, at one point, dominated this exact genre — and Channing Tatum, and an equally over-the-top villain (Adrien Brody plays the character like one of his Wes Anderson characters with the campiness of Daniel Radcliffe in The Lost City) with much better action.
The bankable stars carry Ghosted. The film is at its best when Sadie and Cole are bantering. Evans, whose performance is not that dissimilar from his in the MCU as straight-arrow Captain America, does have an innate ability to play a character who’s allergic to violence for someone of his build. It’s surprising given that many of his non-MCU roles such as Lucas Lee or Ransom Drysdale are generally smarmy guys and Cole is adorably important.
Ana de Armas, on the other hand, continues her streak of impressive action roles since No Time to Die. While de Armas and Evans shared the screen in Knives Out and The Gray Man (Ghosted almost feels like an apology to fans of the two for that monstrosity), their dorky dynamic here works a lot better than what we’ve seen from them in the past where they are opposite of one another.
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While folks on Twitter were pointing out some of the unnatural chemistry of Evans and de Armas in Ghosted, I think it works for these characters. The stair sequence is admittedly a bit jarring and does seem like a case of a reshoot when both leads were unable to be on-set, but as far as the characters go, they meet and get on well for one date, so it’s not like they’ve been in a long-term relationship and seem awkward. If anything, this energy should've gone toward de Armas and her on-screen and ex-real-life boyfriend Ben Affleck in Deep Water last year.
The action sequences are mostly choreographed well — though they have to work against Cole usually avoiding any altercations as Sadie kicks butt. However, the editing can occasionally take over too much and the sequences feel unfocused. It’s never as bad of a hit job as Taken 3’s editing was, but it’s noticeable. That's possibly due to the scope of the film, which is more awkward than the stair scene. We begin in the suburbs of D.C., go to London (though we only get a quick glimpse of the Tower Bridge before leaving London), and then hit a few other countries in the span of 110 minutes. Whether it was pandemic-related or budgetary constraints, the scope of the film feels relatively small for what's supposed to be a globe-trotting action flick.
And while some sequences fly — the bus chase that pays homage to Indiana Jones is a highlight — others, such as the third act finale which utilizes a revolving restaurant, look iffy. In the case of the restaurant, it already looks fake when the actors are sitting down, let alone when the action ramps up and it becomes spinning faster and people are flying around. Why the film didn’t opt for more hand-to-hand combat is a mystery, as de Armas excels at this type of action, but going for comic book movie-sized action without the budget of a comic book movie rarely works out.
Should you stream Ghosted?
Evans and de Armas do their part to elevate this old-school rom-com action flick into an enjoyable 110 minutes. It’s not groundbreaking — nor is much non-indie filmmaking these days — but you can’t go wrong watching Ghosted given how harmless and fun it is. We need to just remember how to have fun at the movies (or in the case of Ghosted, your own couch) and that films like this aren't made anymore, and for your own sake, you best not leave Chris Evans or Ana de Armas on read.
Grade: B-
Ghosted will be released on April 21 on Apple TV+.
