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.
After Cole gets, here it comes, ghosted by her, he bizarrely decides to track her down and creepily flies to London after accidentally leaving a tracking device on her person or something. She’s as alarmed as we are by his behaviour but is forced to protect him when her real profession is revealed and the two find themselves on the run.
With heightened material such as this, no one expects, or really wants, anything that exists in a grounded real world but there’s something so uneasily, almost creepily, synthetic about every single frame of Ghosted, from the awkwardly robotic dialogue to the uncomfortably asexual central pairing to some shockingly subpar green-screen work, that we still don’t want it to exist within the confines of a cheap simulation (it’s the rare Apple movie that looks like a Netflix one). It’s a strange blip for actor-director Dexter Fletcher, stumbling from the Elton John biopic Rocketman into the netherworld of big-budget anonymity, his film more the product of an uninterested committee of tech execs than anyone remotely interested in the world of entertainment. There are embarrassingly dated action sequences with songs like Are You Gonna Be My Girl?, My Sharona and, groan, Uptown Funk loudly blasted over shoddy editing and laboured choreography, interspersed with eye-rollingly unfunny quips, as if a computer was asked to remake Mr and Mrs Smith for Tubi.
The death of the movie star has been greatly overstated but the pairing of Evans and Armas (previously seen in Knives Out and The Gray Man) is so disastrously misjudged, it does make one seriously question what the industry now thinks a star is and what we as an audience are expected to accept from them. Like last year’s similarly wretched Red Notice, which saw Ryan Reynolds, the Rock and Gal Gadot all compete to see who could be the least charismatic actor on screen, it’s as actively uncomfortable for us as it appears to be for them (a scene of the pair kissing on a beach is so glumly reticent that it seems as though it was performed at gunpoint). It’s not as if the ChatGPT-level script gives them much of anything to work with (“You thought you met a hottie, not a Mata Hari!” is an almost impressively heinous attempt at a zinger) but well-paid stars of this calibre should be able to bring more of an uplift; they’re stilted when they should be sleek.
As with everyone else involved in the film (including Adrien Brody as a ridiculously accented French villain and poor Amy Sedaris stuck playing a stock photo mum who becomes sentient), it just feels like pure, cold paycheque work, clocked in and checked out. If they don’t seem to care then why on earth should we?
Ghosted is available on Apple TV+ on 21 April
