Ghosted

Grade: C-

Throughout various press appearances while promoting Ghosted, stars Chris Evans and Ana de Armas have pointed out that they are working together for the third time (after The Gray Man and Knives Out) – but with this one, it’s nice to finally play characters who like each other. Ghosted is a romantic comedy that gets thrust into a convoluted, complicated action subplot that takes over, and ultimately forgets what kind of movie it started out as. It’s an action comedy, but doesn’t really succeed at either.

I know Chris Evans as Captain America, from the tiny bit of Marvel material I reluctantly went to see. It’s been fun to track Ana de Armas’s career since her breakthrough role in Knives Out. She received an Oscar nomination for playing Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, and was quite effective in the underrated Deep Water. In Ghosted, she looks, runs, and fights like a million bucks, and makes a miraculous recovery from a stab wound that seems to be old news in less than a day.

But let’s go back to the beginning, where we find out how the movie gets its name. Evans and de Armas play Cole and Sadie. They have a Meet Cute at a farmer’s market, which leads to a lengthy date. Cole sends a series of texts and emojis in the following days, but hears absolutely nothing back. Because he accidentally left his inhaler with her, which has a GPS tracker on it, he’s able to find out that she is in London. Inexplicably, with full permission and encouragement from his parents, he impulsively flies across the pond to find Sadie and surprise her. He’s not there very long when he is kidnapped, mistaken for an elusive crime lord known as the Taxman, almost tortured, and then rescued at the last split second by Sadie, who turns out to be a CIA agent. And Cole’s asthma is never an issue again, even in the intense chase and combat scenes that follow.

If it sounds like I’ve revealed too much, I really haven’t. There’s an almost suffocating amount of additional plot and details dropped in. The action scenes are too choreographed, bombastic, and played up. They reside in the same neighborhood as Indiana Jones, Nintendo, and Looney Tunes. The two leads frequently bicker about trivial relationship things while getting shot at and fighting bad guys. There’s a terrible groaner of a through-line where a handful of people (captors, bosses, or other assorted villains) hear their conversations and tell them they need to get a room. I don’t think there’s a thing that happens in the climactic scene that is logistically or physically plausible. It’s on the top floor of a skyscraper. A fancy revolving restaurant. With as long as they’re sitting at the table, we never see the characters approached or greeted by the wait staff. Trust me, that’s the least of this sequence’s problems.

Ghosted is an uneven, unfocused, unfunny, unrealistic, unbelievable mess. Maybe it’s better when Evans and de Armas play characters who are at odds.

Grade: C-