APPLE TV’S ROMANTIC ACTION-COMEDY, ‘GHOSTED’, was vilified and torn into pieces by foreign critics, like they’re expecting it to be nominated for an award or something.
The most common complaint is that the material is already familiar, having already been used in such similar action comedies as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “True Lies” and Tom Cruise’s “Knight and Day”, where a clueless character is dragged into lots of dangerous situations by his or her partner.
For us, though, “Ghosted” serves its purpose and achieves its goal, ticking off all the expected boxes in its formula as a mindless piece of disposable confection that you don’t have to take seriously at all.
Chris Evans is the innocent bystander here, Cole, a farmer who lives an uneventful life helping his parents and sister in their agriculture business.
In a farmer’s market, he meets Ana de Armas as Sadie, an art curator who buys a plant from him.
They hit it off well and end up spending the night together. When he gets home, Cole continually sends text messages to Sadie but he gets no response.
His sister tells Cole that Sadie has ghosted him because he is too needy and clingy and that scares women.
A tracker tells him that Sadie is in London and his parents urge him to follow her there and surprise her, as that would be so sweet and romantic.
Basically a homebody, Cole has not left the U.S. at all, but he does go to London to track down Sadie.
But he instead walks into a trap intended for an arms dealer called Taxman.
He is knocked down and while unconscious, is taken to Pakistan where the bad guys think he is Taxman and forces him to reveal the passcode for a deadly bio-weapon called Aztec.
A nasty Frenchman called Leveque (Adrien Brody, “The Pianist”) has sold it to terrorists even if he does not have it yet in his possession.
Cole is about to be brutally tortured when a masked rescuer comes along, kills the bad guys and saves him.
It turns out to be Sadie, who is the real Taxman and is an undercover agent. And from here on, they get into more risky and exciting misadventures.
Along the way, they meet Marco (Marwan Kenzari), Sadie’s ex lover who she instructs to help Cole return to the U.S.
But a series of bounty hunters come along to make life even more difficult for all of them.
The movie is directed by British director Dexter Fletcher of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Rocketman”.
He comes up with big, well staged action set pieces and stunts, like the furious car chase sequence through the famous Khyber Mountain Pass in Pakistan, where they shoot it out with thugs who are pursuing them.
Sadie uses Cole as bait and they are hijacked on a plane with the bioweapon.
They fight it off and manage to parachute out of the plane into a deserted island where more gunfights occur.
The climax is staged in a high end revolving restaurant on a tower that they get to wreck during the subsequent shootout.
The movie offers unpretentious, mindless fun that makes you smile and laugh, without requiring you to think hard at all.
This is served along with the star power and charisma of Chris and Ana who have previously worked together in “Knives Out” and “The Gray Man” but not as each other’s love interest like in here.
They both look like they’re having fun and give spirited performances in this romp that blends romance, comedy and action-spy tropes.
What makes it fun is the twist that it’s not the guy who kicks ass but Ana as the CIA agent, while Chris is just in the background trying to dodge the bullets from the gunfire that come their way.
Chris nails the hopeless romantic and gentleman in distress role and is so good playing the bumbling hero you won’t think he has played super hero roles before.
As the distressed companion, there is a ribtickling dynamic between him and Ana, who is the busiest Hispanic actress in Hollywood today.
She has previously played the female agent role competently as Paloma in “No Time to Die” and also as CIA agent Dani in “The Gray Man”.
The banter and bickering between them can be quite funny, like when Ana tells Chris that he “stalkered” her to London but he says she also used her database to look him up.
It is through these moments that we see they’re really both hot and this is why lots of people keep telling them to get a room.
They also get a great supporting cast starting with Adrien Brody as Leveque, Tim Blake Nelson as a bad guy who aims to torture Chris with deadly insects, Amy Sedaris and Tate Donovan as Chris’ parents,
and various goofy cameos like Anthony Mackie as the grandson of Sam, Sebastian Stan as God, John Cho as the Leopard and Ryan Reynolds as Jonas, who all just pop up on screen from nowhere to make things more amusing.
