Getting ghosted is an unpleasant, yet common part of our modern lifestyle. It’s easy to do, and mostly easy to move on from. Sometimes we get ghosted by people we hope to see again, and maybe we even decide to try to follow them and rekindle the romance. But as this film shows, that might not be the best course of action.
Ghosted stars Chris Evans (from the Avengers and Knives Out) as Cole, a man living on his parent’s farm and looking for love. But he’s too scared to leave home and find it. One day he meets Sadie (played by Ana de Armas from Knives Out and Blonde), a beautiful woman who seems to be perfect for him. They spend a day together, and it becomes clear that there is something growing between them. But after that day, she ghosts him. He decides to be all romantic and fly across the Atlantic ocean and look for her. While he does find her, he also finds out that she’s an international spy and a much more complicated person than he expected.
A great film should be more than the sum of its parts, and a good film should be an entertaining sum of its parts. What we have here is a film that has entertaining parts, and a rather large ask of the audience. That inquiry is that the audience could believe a man would fly around the world to pursue somebody he had a good first date with, and that he would choose to stay following frequent encounters with death. This is an incredibly unlikely situation, and the only way it works is if the audience believes in the romantic chemistry between the two leads.
Both Evans and de Armas are beautiful people, and they do have chemistry. But while the film shows that in spades, it also shows a large degree of argumentative sexual tension between the two. While the two each have character arcs showing them moving past their flaws to potentially become closer, the arguing never seems to go away. A lot of the audience watching this film may find themselves wondering why these two stay together.
The biggest problem with Ghosted is that it’s quite sanitized. Obviously there is sexual attraction and tension, but there isn’t sex. The film feels clean, as if it’s worried about showing too much sex it might not appeal to everybody. From one date, both of these people seem to be committed to a point of staying with each other through stabbings and torture and crash landings. It doesn’t feel realistic, it just feels like a corporate ideal that’s afraid of taking a risk. All in all, this hurts the narrative rather than helping it.
To be clear, this is an entertaining movie but it’s not a memorable one. Both the leads play their parts quite well, from the physical fights to the romantic fights. And the direction from Dexter Fletcher (who previously made Rocketman) is sufficient, especially with energizing action scenes. Fun supporting performances from Western actors doing their cheesiest European accents add a little flavour to the film, including Adrien Brody (from the Pianist) as a generic French villain. The film has many good parts, but as a whole feels somewhat lacking.
All in all, Ghosted is not a bad film. It’s a serviceable film that could have been a great film. It feels like it’s trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator by being generic, instead of focusing on the specificities regarding why the two leads are attracted to each other. We live in an era where stars look beautiful, but not sexy. This film would make for an entertaining date night, but in 20 years few will remember this. When people will think of Ana de Armas and Chris Evans, they’ll probably think of Knives Out instead as the years go by. Ghosted gets a 2.5/5, and you can watch it on Apple TV+ starting on April 21, 2023.
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