‘Ghosted’ movie review: Ghost yourself from this Chris Evans, Ana de Armas fever dream

Chris Evans and Ana de Armas in a still from ‘Ghosted’
| Photo Credit: Apple TV

Have you ever felt so mentally dead that you end up picturing a mini-version of yourself dancing atop your head to kill time? Hollywood hotshots Chris Evans and Ana de Armas escape bullets and bad guys to retrieve a biological weapon inside a posh restaurant in the third act of this Dexter Fletcher directorial… while we choke on the toxic pixie dust from the plasticky narrative, that is drained by mind-numbingly predictable writing.

Chat GPT could have written a more interesting plotline than Ghosted, another excruciatingly dull actioner with a lot of opulence — big stars, flashy cameos, gorgeous set pieces, and insane production value, enough to suffocate and make you look past the missing novelty.

After her stellar turn in Blonde, Ana de Armas gets an easier paycheque to play Sadie, a young, lonely woman questioning her career after a co-worker’s death. At a market, she goes to a stall where freshly-heartbroken farmer Cole Turner (Evans) helps her in choosing a house plant that doesn’t need love for months. She is torn between one that can die in days and a cactus that can survive for weeks. She eventually chooses the former, irking Cole’s good consciousness. An argument ensues and dies, but Cole sees some spark underneath all the tension; he asks her out and she agrees, and they go on a long date. It’s the routine movie meet-cute; starts with sweet small talk about their different interests (here, horror movies) and ends with the two disclosing personal traumas and bodies.

But it’s all quite terrible. The dialogues don’t feel organic, and two house plants at that stall would share a better chemistry than Evans and Ana de in these scenes.

The date does however flesh out a certain duality; the film’s only morsel of anything resembling genuine. Cole is old-school, affectionate and fool-hardy. Cold Sadie is just opening up to the warmth of human relationships. She can perform rock karaoke in front of a crowd, while he prefers to be left alone. Sadie wants a partner like a plant that can live without water for months, and Cole is the opposite. The locations and the colour tones are either green or grey.

ALSO READ: ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ series review: A magnificent Kathryn Hahn anchors this emotional and engaging show

When Sadie doesn’t respond to his umpteen naggy texts (he’s, wait for it, GHOSTED), this Romeo goes all the way to London — it’s better you don’t know how he figured out her current location — where, after some unfortunate events, realises that she is a CIA agent masquerading as an art curator (Guns and roses? War and peace? Get it?). Now the trouble begins. Barring a sequence featuring cameos from Evans’ Marvel colleagues, even its attempts at comedy fail so spectacularly that a 15-second filler of some old English cabbie who picks Cole from the airport seems gold.

Unfortunately, Ghosted takes itself quite seriously, though it has all the right ingredients for a good spoof. The film does unintentionally make a joke out of Adrien Brody playing the caricaturish big boss baddie, Leveque, who mistakenly believes that Cole is his nemesis, an agent nicknamed Taxman (it’s Sadie). And yes, despite knowing these guys and their misidentification, Sadie plans to ditch and dash Cole once he’s “safe.”

But what can you expect from a film that gives the normie lead a plot armour so big that it’s visible from the Eiffel Tower? Apparently, Taxman knows a passcode for the weapon and so the baddies want him alive, not dead, or “the bounty moves to their head.” Yikes! Ghosted is a film you should watch if you have never been ghosted by someone, just to know how it feels like. Only getting over someone might be easier than sitting through this bad fever dream.

Ghosted is currently streaming on Apple TV+