You might wonder why Ghosted, an action rom-com starring recent Oscar nominee Ana de Armas and Marvel superstar Chris Evans, is premiering on a streaming service – Apple TV+ – instead of getting a legitimate theatrical release. It hasn’t even been a month since news came out that Apple would be making a concerted effort (and spending serious dollars) to give their films true releases in theaters. So why not give this starry film a shot at box office dollars? When you finally see Ghosted, you begin to understand. The film has all the visual red flags of a straight-to-streaming release, from its amateurish CGI (of which there is so, so much) to its poor attempts at making Atlanta look like the mountains of Pakistan. It’s the epitome of streaming in this way, a junky facsimile of a blockbuster, with movie stars who helplessly attempt to convince you that what you’re watching is the real thing.

You may remember that De Armas and Evans starred in another high-concept streaming release in 2022, Netflix’s The Gray Man, which was unequivocally the worst movie that I saw last year. Ghosted isn’t as bad as that, and unlike Gray Man, the two stars walk away from this one with their dignity intact. It should be said that Ghosted is ultimately watchable, the kind of bad movie that you wouldn’t mind watching twenty minutes of in a hotel room between vacation activities. That De Armas and Evans show promise as an onscreen duo only makes it more frustrating that the movie itself is mostly an anchor on their talents. Everyone else, including director Dexter Fletcher, is working in a rote, punch-the-clock fashion. Four credited screenwriters makes it clear that this is a film that few people want to be responsible for.

Evans plays Cole Turner, a farmer based just outside of DC who runs a tent in a farmer’s market. Cole has aspirations to write books about the connections between history and agriculture, a subject that triggers his passion unlike anything else. After his father (Tate Donovan) injured himself, he agreed to help him and his mother (Amy Sedaris) run the family farm and he hasn’t been able to break away since. In love, he has a reputation for neediness which has driven many romantic prospects away. He meets Sadie (De Armas) when she tries to buy a plant from his stall. Their introduction is less a meet cute than a full-blown argument about taking care of plants. Despite this, Cole decides to ask her out and Sadie agrees. This is a motif throughout the film – their many shouting matches with one another is meant to simmer with sexual tension – and one of many that an audience would struggle to understand.

After a night of in-depth conversation followed by a morning of lovemaking, Cole thinks he may have found the one. His sister, Mattie (Lizze Broadway) is skeptical, sure that Cole has once again misread the situation. Mattie appears to be correct when Sadie answers none of Cole’s many, many text messages. He’s being ghosted. Desperate, he decides to seek her out, only to learn that she’s in London. Cole flies to England in a spurt of spontaneous romance, hoping to surprise her and rekindle their magical night together. He instead finds himself abducted and being tortured by a Russian (Tim Blake Nelson) with terrifying insects. He evades major injury when Sadie arrives and rescues him; ends up she’s a CIA agent in London trying to locate a bio-weapon called “Aztec” that is in the midst of being sold to a dangerous man.

The high-concept nature of the plot has promise but Ghosted doesn’t take much advantage of what it has, nor does it utilize the charm of its actors. It instead spends most of the time making them argue with one another in ways that makes you question how this could possibly be a prospective romance. The main villain is a Frenchman named Leveque (Adrian Brody), who has Aztec but is looking for “The Taxman”, who is said to possess the passcode to open it. Through a slip-up, Leveque and his henchman believe that Cole is the Taxman, making him a massive target not only for Leveque but for every bounty hunter on the planet. Sadie does her best to protect Cole, though she is mostly frustrated by how his presence has disrupted her mission. “Mission over man” is a mantra she repeats to herself frequently.

Calling the character “The Taxman” gives the film little more than opportunities for Ghosted to make frequent Beatles references, and when the anticipated needle-drop finally happens in the third act, even I – an avowed Beatles obsessive – rolled my eyes at the obviousness of it all. In the end, this is a movie that asks Tim Blake Nelson to have a Russian accent and Adrien Brody to have a French accent. It’s hard to get too worked up about a film that takes itself this un-seriously. I do feel like Evans and De Armas mostly do their best with the provided material – though you might be able to imagine a different caliber of star elevating it even more. I don’t personally think anything could be salvaged from this awful screenplay, especially when the most polite way to describe director Dexter Fletcher’s visual aesthetic is “autopilot”.

 

Directed by Dexter Fletcher