Chris Evans and Ana de Armas make for a chemistry-free pairing in Apple’s catastrophically misfiring mockbuster
It’s easy to see the commercial allure of Apple’s pre-summer mockbuster Ghosted, the package: a snappy buzzword title, an idea from the Deadpool team later fleshed out by some Marvel writers, a big, sexy star pairing proved on screen twice before, an action-comedy-romance hybrid designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. One can only imagine the enthused high-fives that took place in some cold, pristine LA boardroom when it was given the green light. But it’s utterly impossible to see the appeal of Ghosted, the movie, a staggeringly, maddeningly atrocious heap of increasingly boneheaded decisions that will act as depressing documentation of just how rotten things got in the current oversaturated streaming landscape.
Ghosted is content dictated by algorithm at its absolute, industry-shaming worst, so carelessly and lifelessly cobbled together that we’re inclined to believe it’s the first film created entirely by AI. It’s almost avant-garde in its all-consuming awfulness, made with sheer contempt for the usual base staples one expects from a movie, head-shakingly shambolic on all fronts. It’s smug elevator pitch over plot – a guy gets ghosted by a woman who ends up being a secret agent – and while the early inevitable trailer scenes that take us to the end of this logline are bad enough they’re nowhere near as bad as what follows. Chris Evans plays Cole, a farmer slash history academic slash plant obsessive who meets Ana de Armas’s mysterious art curator Sadie one day at the farmers’ market. After some truly painful banter about plants, they decide to go on an impromptu date, the kind that cuts to them in an art gallery with her beaming “Oh my God, I love Monet!” or the pair next to the tower of Lincoln books and her noting “Sounds like you love Lincoln!”, crushingly bland meet-cute dialogue that removes us from their journey before it truly begins.
