The romantic action comedy has always had a breathlessly eager-to-please, overstuffed quality. You might say its a whats-not-to-like genre. We laugh! With pulses racing! And swoon at the moonstruck chemistry! In a superior rom-act-com, like Romancing the Stone or Out of Sight or True Lies or the new Murder Mystery sequel, the action is the romance its how the characters connect. (One way the form extends vintage Hollywood screwball is that it tends to be about couples who so dislike each other that only by joining in death-defying scrapes can they melt the ice.) But then there are movies like Mr. Mrs. Smith, where the love gets sandwiched between vehicular mayhem so aggressive its played for laughs, and the too-muchness of the whole thing becomes like one of those fast-food fusion experiments. Sorry, but the movie escapism equivalent of a burger topped with a quesadilla served with cheese fries is not my idea of a good time.
And thats what Ghosted is. Directed by the awesomely unsubtle Dexter Fletcher (Rocketman), from a what-the-hell-lets-throw-it-in-there script by four screenwriters (Rhett Reese, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Paul Wernick) that makes you grateful there werent four more, the movie is a romantic action comedy that starts off light and breezy but turns, before you know it, into a dead-weight spectacle of wretched excess.
Were talking a set-up thats too defiantly farfetched to hook into. Fight scenes out of a Jason Statham movie but staged with far less precision. An arbitrary series of international settings. An espionage-thriller plot thats just convoluted yet inconsequential enough to be thoroughly annoying. And a romantic connection between the two stars that doesnt so much grow and develop as metastasize and get trampled, though theoretically were meant to look at their machinations and think: The couple that makes it through a top-heavy put-on thriller this exhausting together stays together.
Ghosted starts off in Washington, D.C., as a beguiling screwball confection, with Chris Evans, all sexy beard and menschy grin, and Ana de Armas, all spiked flirtation, getting into an argument the moment they meet cute. Hes Cole, a farmer whos minding a potted-plant stand at the farmers market; shes Sadie, an art curator whos buying the wrong plant. But their squabble melts into an afternoon coffee, then a visit to the Exorcist stairs in Georgetown and a live-band karaoke bar, then a wander through the city that lasts all night, followed by a hop into the sack that seals the deal. The characters connect; the actors connect. The only conflict hinted at arrives in the form of a running joke about a potted cactus, which symbolizes two things: the tendency of one party (her) to neglect what shes supposed to be nurturing (thats why the cactus is the perfect plant for her), and the tendency of another (him) to be overly needy, which means that he could use a bit of that prickliness. So far, so fun.
The title sounds like its telling us that someones going to get ghosted but its actually a reference to Coles paranoia about being ghosted, which leads him to frantically text Sadie the next day. (He doesnt think hes sending her too many texts, because he doesnt count the emoji texts.) Cole lives with his family on a lovely farm outside Washington, where his folksy parents (Tate Donovan and Amy Sedaris) are more supportive of him than his brassy sister (Lizze Broadway) is. But they all can agree on this: Calm it down! Dont act so needy!
Cole, however, cant help himself. Its in his nature to be that outdated thing, the overly super-nice guy. So after Sadie doesnt return his texts, and he discovers, by tracking the asthma inhaler he left in her purse (thats the first time our plausibility alert button goes off; it wont be the last), that shes gone to London, he makes an impulsive decision. He will fly across the ocean and surprise her! As if this were the climax of a 90s rom-com and not the kickoff of an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink streaming movie.
Will Cole look like a stalker? Of course he will! No sane person would do this. But the movie needs him to be in London so that he can suddenly get surrounded by three henchman who mistake him forthe Taxman. Thats the code name for a mysterious espionage specter he is very much not. (Its also an excuse to use the Beatles Taxman.) So why would they think thats who he is? Why would a sinister baddie (Tim Blake Nelson) with a Cold War Dracula accent strap him into a chair and begin torturing him with a smorgasbord of live bugs? If you havent already figured it out, the theme of Ghosted or at least its modus operandi is, Why ask why?
A good rom-act-com should escalate, slowly but surely, so the audience feels like its being invited along for the ride. Ghosted, on the other hand, wastes no time dropping Cole and Sadie into a desert in Pakistan, where they commander a colorful spangly indigenous bus and engage in a cliff-side road chase that looks like it wants to be the centerpiece sequence of Indiana Jones XIV. That Cole, an innocent farmer, is already hanging off the side of the bus like an action demigod is less nagging than the central confusion built into the story. Sadie, in case I forgot to mention it, is a CIA cutthroat who didnt plan on Cole following her to London. Yet she never looks the least bit nonplussed about the fact that he showed up. Even as they become partners, the two maintain their hostility, which is partly rooted in her man over mission ethos. (She values the mission more than the life of any colleague. Including Cole.)
Yet for two sloggy hours, we could care less about the mission. Yes, its all a MacGuffin (or about three of them), starting with Aztec, a biomedical weapon that Leveque (Adrien Brody), a saturnine baddie, is trying to get hold of. Yet the film barely musters the pretense that any of this matters. Evans, Marvel hero that he is, is canny enough to flirt with nerdishness, but he spends too much of Ghosted acting petulant, maybe because he has to react to one too many lines like You thought you met a hottie. Not a Mata Hari! And de Armas, Im afraid, turns into Mata Glare-y.
In a running gag, famous actors keep showing up, unbilled, as assassins, only to be assassinated after two minutes of screen time. In another running gag, everyone keeps telling Cole and Sadie, You two should get a room, the joke being that theyre fighting like cats and dogs. We get it: Theyre expressing their sexual chemistry. Theres an action scene set aboard a plane set to Jets triumphantly raucous Are You Gonna Be My Girl, which leads to the two being stranded on an island in the Arabian Sea. At this point you may start to notice that the movie isnt building their chemistry its getting in the way of it.
Ghosted works up to an elaborate sequence, set in a glassed-in skyscraper restaurant, that may remind you of a lot of other, better sequences. The espionage intrigue is rote; the action is more bombastic than any rom-act-com can truly sustain. Im not sure if Dexter Fletcher has it in him to stage an elegantly fanciful-yet-plausible action scene. Yet in Ghosted, he tosses a whole lot of stuff into the blender, and thats supposed to be enough. The action in this movie doesnt really do much to bring the two characters together, except to the extent that when its over its like Novocaine wearing off.