Ghosted Review - A Silly Little Spy Movie

The marketing for Dexter Fletcher’s Ghosted was next to none. A clip I saw on Chris Evans’ Instagram once, decided I must watch it and swiftly forgot about it until yesterday, the day it came out. Ghosted is an espionage action comedy starring ‘Knives Out’s own Chris Evans and Ana de Armas. Of course, it’s a duo we’ve already seen shine in the brilliant whodunnit, Evans playing sly and arrogant Ransom Drysdale and de Armas the timid caregiver Marta Cabrera. A role for Evans that doesn’t stray too far from the action hero he seems to play in most of the projects he leads. In Ghosted, Evans plays farmer, historian, needy yet loveable Cole, while de Armas takes up the role of supposed art curator, actual spy Sadie.

Ghosted follows the blossoming relationship of the two, Cole’s neediness and ‘grand romantic gesture’ following an epic first date and Sadie ghosting him getting him caught up in the world of agents and spies as he is mistaken for ‘The Tax Man’; the holder of the passcode to one of the most powerful weapons on Earth - Aztec.

The movie is fun, incredibly so. Between the childish bickering of the two leads and the fast cut bounty hunter sequence at the end of the first act, the movie was thoroughly enjoyable. I didn’t find myself cringing at the writing *that* much like I do more often than not with many movies nowadays, though I guess that could be put down to the talent of Evans and de Armas. The film in itself was just every other fun spy movie, one I could compare quite well to Red Notice and Central Intelligence.

There were elements that were a little bit too stupid. Jokes that didn’t land at all, the obsessive texting problem they gave Cole slowed the plot down and got a little bit repetitive as the movie went on, especially as it didn’t add all that much to the overarching storyline. Cole’s family were insufferable, playing far too into the stereotypes of ‘irritating little sister’, ‘smothering mother’ and ‘father that doesn’t know what’s too much’. The villain also had a strange almost Russian accent that was over-the-top and just a bit shit that it wasn’t as funny as they hoped it would be and there was a perfectly failed use of Chekhov’s gun in the repetitive close ups of a gross little centipede that didn’t end up being important in the slightest.

Although the binary opposites used of agriculture to insects could be deemed quite clever, those niches were so weird and unrelatable it seemed a bit useless, especially as the bugs were so unimportant and Cole’s plant knowledge only became significant in one scene that could very easily be missed.

The film was good though, don’t get me wrong, the sort of silly film I’ll put on in the background because it’s so easy to follow. It’s also hard not to fall for a film with so unnecessarily attractive leads and cameos of three of my all-time favourite actors that very quickly picked the film back up when it was starting to drag again – which the beginning really did.

All I’d say is don’t expect amazing things, but it’s definitely one to have fun with.