Ghosted - Review

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

ON PAPER, Ghosted sounded like a pretty safe bet. A romantic action comedy harking back to the filmmaking style of Mr & Mrs Smith and True Lies, this also boasted two attractive A-list leads (in Ana de Armas and Chris Evans), a decent director (Dexter Fletcher, of Sunshine on Leith, Rocketman fame) and a script from Deadpool duo Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.

It also sought to place a post-modern spin on the age-old spy genre in which a good-looking male comes to the aid of an everyday female caught in a situation beyond their control, having been bedazzled by the spy's charm and good looks. In this case, it's a gender flip, which finds de Armas playing the kick-ass spy and Evans as the hapless ride-along.

But while entertaining in places, with some decent set pieces to its name, Ghosted never fulfils its undoubted potential. 

It's too often laboured, obvious and even lazy and lacks any real chemistry. It's also tonally uneven.The story follows down on his luck farmer Cole (Evans) hooking up with a mysterious art curator named Sadie (de Armas) and being swept off his feet by her charm and beauty after a single, day-long date. When she subsequently fails to respond to any of his texts (effectively ghosting him), Cole responds to a suggestion from one of his family members to follow her to London and surprise her.

He views this as a romantic gesture. She sees it as stalking. It's up to audiences to decide where they fall on that.

Nevertheless, once in London, and before he can even find Sadie, Cole is abducted by terrorists and tortured for the code to a bomb, having mistakenly been identified as 'the taxman'. He is only saved by Sadie, who bursts onto the scene and kills almost everyone in sight.

The ensuing film finds Cole coming to terms with Sadie's 'deception' about being a CIA spy and following her around the world as she attempts to stop the criminals (led by Adrien Brody's dodgily accented Leveque) from acquiring and selling the bomb.

It's a well-trodden scenario that borrows from the likes of Bond, Bourne and Mr & Mrs Smith, while attempting to mix romance, comedy and action.

To be fair, the early moments between Evans and de Armas show promise and play like a decent rom-com. While the production teams' wider links to the Marvel universe also yield some surprise cameos that contribute to at least one standout action sequence.

There is fun to be had.

But while this ensures that Ghosted never feels like a complete waste of time, it also highlights the film's shortcomings even more.

The early chemistry exhibited between Evans and de Armas soon dissipates into shouting and bickering that becomes tiresome, while nods to the gender-flipped sexuality feeling obvious and self-congratulatory. There's nothing clever here - and the likes of the recently rebooted Mr & Mrs Smith (for Amazon Prime) freshened up the format in a much more convincing and intelligent manner.

Action-wise, the set pieces are spectacular without ever coming close to being genuinely inventive - with both Evans and de Armas having performed better in things like Captain America: The Winter Soldier and No Time To Die.

The shifts in tone, from comedy to drama, sometimes feel awkward, especially when some of the violence gets nasty (one death involving insects is particularly unpleasant), while even Evans transition from stay-at-home nice guy to all-action hero in waiting feel too efficient and constitute what Deadpool would call 'lazy writing'. At least in something like True Lies, Jamie Lee Curtis' standout moment involved equal parts skill and luck.

Brody plays his villain to pantomime effect, complete with aforementioned dodgy accent, and struggles to imbue the film with any sense of threat - which is another of Ghosted's failings. The stakes aren't high enough and there's no sense of peril.

The result is a film that owes more in fumbled execution to Tom Cruise's Knight and Day than it does any of the better entries in the genre. And like Knight & Day, it's a film you'll probably want to like more than you actually do.