‘Ghosted’ Review: Chris Evans and Ana de Armas’ Chemistry Has Lost the Battle Against the Generic and Unoriginal Screenplay
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There have always been and always will be romantic action comedies. Few of them have managed to remain in our fond memories despite all that competition, but it seems that this genre has been becoming more and more passé over the last few years. That explains why a movie like Ghosted, which is backed by quite famous names, would be filmed exclusively for streaming instead of having regular theatrical distribution. And what pains me to say, the fact that the movie was made for streaming actually only lessened the damage this movie left behind.
Ghosted was directed by Dexter Fletcher, who directed movies like Eddie the Eagle and Rocketman and was the uncredited director of Bohemian Rhapsody. The movie was written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who wrote the previous two Deadpool movies (and will write the third), with the help of Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, another screenwriting duo who wrote all three Spider-Man movies starring Tom Holland, and on top of all that, when you add known and beautiful faces and charisma of Chris Evans and Ana de Armas, you expect something at least solid for one action-comedy.
Although this movie came from the minds of the people who wrote the Deadpool movies, don’t expect anything vulgar or controversial here. This is as PG-13 movie as it gets, but even if it had been adapted for a more mature audience, a script like this could hardly be salvaged.
Unfortunately, the presence of Chris and Ana, and their undoubted chemistry in front of the camera, is one of the few, and perhaps the only, positive aspects of this movie. This movie confirms the thesis that these types of movies are mostly made so that the actors and production crew can go on vacation to a couple of beautiful locations and make a movie while they are there. The story is one huge cliché, formulaic and unoriginal, which might not be a problem if it wasn’t so clumsily executed narratively. It’s enough to say that the movie is less than two hours long, and somehow it managed to come off as overlong.
As for the characters, how best to explain them? It’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen such a huge amount of one-dimensional characters in one movie. Practically anyone could have played characters like this, and the two main stars, alongside Adrien Brody, who plays the villain here, were brought here solely because they are stars. Streaming movies do not have such a wide promotional campaign as cinema titles, and I guess the producers thought that these known names would make people watch this movie. And that would probably work, but the movie has to be good.
On the surface, it seems to me that the movie suffers from the same problems that plagued Netflix’s most successful original movie to date, Red Notice. The problem with such movies is that they are very expensive, but when most of the budget goes to the salaries of such well-known names, it seems that there is not much room left to write a decent screenplay.
This is supported by the fact that Ghosted has a few more famous surprise actors. I won’t reveal them to you, but that just added salt to the wound of how poorly written this was, no matter how glad you might be to see those known faces. Also, I must highlight that very cringe slow-motion that was used unwisely. And as for dialogue and humor, because this is supposed to be a comedy at the end of the day, I’ll say that if you’re looking for a good laugh, you’ll hardly find it here.
At the end of the ballad, unless you’re a hardcore fan who really, really loves watching Chris Evans and Ana de Armas on your screen, no matter what they’re in, I don’t see how anyone could like something like Ghosted. Chris and Ana did their jobs as well as they could deal with the material they were given, but these two simply deserve much better movies. I hope that this was just a temporary exhibition into bad waters for Reese and Wernick and that they have something good in store for us after this (read: Deadpool 3).
Ghosted is now streaming on Apple TV+.
