‘Ghosted’ Is One of the Worst Romcoms in Recent Memory
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It’s been a dreadful year — OK, few years — for romcoms. This year gave us Shotgun Wedding, a J.Lo-starring smorgasbord about a destination wedding overrun by pirates; You People, Kenya Barris’ tone-deaf interracial-dating romcom whose big kiss was faked by CGI; and Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher’s Your Place or Mine, with leads that spent close to the entire movie on opposite sides of the country and had zero chemistry. Enter Ghosted, which is so dreadful it makes the aforementioned films look like When Harry Met Sally by comparison.
The opening credits of Ghosted, now streaming on Apple TV+, consist of crescendoing strings as the title GHOSTED, presented in white text, slowly vanishes (get it?!) from the screen. We are on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., as Ana de Armas’ Sadie, sporting one of the most hideous screen wigs this side of Courtney Cox’s baby bangs in Scream 3, a strawberry-blonde monstrosity that looks like a bad disguise, is guiding a car down a lonely road. She receives a call from her therapist about missing an appointment, but she’s been grieving the death of a colleague and replies, “The mountains called.”
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Sadie runs into Cole (Chris Evans) at a farmer’s market to Portugal. The Man’s “Feel It Still,” which has been played-the-fuck-out for years. He’s peddling homemade honey, and is so forgetful that he puts AirTags on everything. His grief is of the more trivial variety: he was recently dumped for being “too needy,” as his pal puts it. He spots Sadie buying potted flowers and makes a beeline (sorry) for her. When Sadie informs him that her job takes her out of town for weeks at a time, Cole proceeds to relentlessly neg her, ranting that he refuses to be the “accomplice to a crime” because she’d likely kill it out of neglect, and offers up a mini cactus instead (more on this later). Sadie leaves in a huff, because Cole seems like a colossal dickhead, though an onlooker informs him that their “sexual tension was off the charts” (reader, it most surely was not), leading Cole to leap in front of her car in the parking lot, causing her potted plant to crack and cover the backseat of her car in soil. This is all seen as endearing instead of creepy and annoying, so she asks him to coffee as Wilco’s “Love Is Everywhere (Beware)” plays (get it?!).
They stroll around D.C., chatting about life. She’s a jetsetting “art curator” who fled to America with her mother on a raft when she was six (a nod to de Armas’ Cuban roots), while Cole is writing a book on farming. He then challenges her to a race up a long flight of stairs, and she leaves him in the dust — because she is, as the trailers have indicated, not a mere “art curator” but rather a covert CIA spy whose handiness with the steel leans more Navy SEAL. Within the first fifteen minutes (or less), it’s readily apparent that de Armas and Evans, charismatic and charming on their own, have next to no chemistry. Every line delivery is so stilted it’s as though they’re being read off cue-cards, a la SNL, and each attempt at flirting feels forced.
Their next stop is a rock-karaoke bar. She smashes it, then signs him up to sing T. Rex’s “20th Century Boy,” but he refuses. This is also somehow appealing to Sadie. They sit on a bench. She says, “If only people could be more like your cactus,” as in not require nourishment. They lock lips as the vibraphone from the Alabama Shakes’ “Sound & Color” booms. They spend the entire night exploring the streets of D.C. and then bang one out in the morning to Dua Lipa’s “Pretty Please,” smooching in bed as the pop star coos, “When your kisses climb / Oh, you give me sweet relief.” To say these musical cues are on the nose would be a massive understatement, then again this is the work of Dexter Fletcher, the director of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman.
The sex goes so well Sadie utters “wow” after, while Cole jokes that it’s her first time scoring with “a farmer.” Sadie departs, and Cole is so ecstatic over their encounter that he pays a visit to his family and tells them, “I know this sounds crazy, but I think she might be the one.” (His parents are played by Tate Donovan and Amy Sedaris, who are given precious little to do.) He also reveals that he took a selfie of them in bed together while she was asleep and has texted her a number of times since, along with “some light emoji stuff,” but was left on read. His younger sister labels him creepy and clingy, and she is right.
I suppose the comedy here lies in the notion that this has probably never happened to blue-eyed, buff, swinging-dick, People’s Sexiest Man Alive, Captain America himself Chris Evans, and that he has probably been the one who’s engaged in said behavior on the regular.
Anyway, Cole left his asthma inhaler in Sadie’s bag which has an AirTag on it, so he geolocates her in London, and, in a truly bananas move, goes there to find her. He’s kidnapped in London by some henchmen, led by Borislov (Tim Blake Nelson, with a wacky Russian accent no doubt inspired by John Malkovich’s in Rounders). They believe he’s a spy who goes by “The Taxman,” and before they can torture him, the real Taxman (Sadie) busts in guns blazing and saves his sorry beekeeping ass.
The next moment, they’ve been transported to Pakistan. And the rest of the film consists of the usual shtick: Cole is wowed by Sadie’s fighting and shooting abilities amid a series of uninspired action set pieces, and the honey man eventually grows a pair and whoops some ass. There’s something about a stolen biochemical weapon they must retrieve that’s powerful enough to “wipe out the Eastern Seaboard,” the duo beat down some goons on a private jet to Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl,” and Adrien Brody pops up as a big bad armed with designer suits and a baffling French accent. Oh, and without giving anything away, we’re treated to cameos from a few onscreen superheroes, including a couple of Evans’ MCU pals.
What When Harry Met Sally made clear is that the keys to a good romcom are a tight, witty script (RIP Nora Ephron) and likable leads that can make it sing. Ghosted, like so many modern-day romcoms, opts for the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. Sometimes less is more, Hollywood.
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