Ana de Armas and Chris Evans turn lovebirds in Apple TV’s Ghosted, but it’s she who calls the shots while he scampers after her. With feel-good vibes, belly laughs and over-the-top action sequences, this Dexter Fletcher-helmed action romcom is an easy breezy watch.
When a grand romantic gesture unleashes chaos
Cole (Evans) runs a potted-plant stall at a Washington D.C. farmers’ market. He meets an international art curator, Sadie (de Armas), who buys the wrong plant from him. The duo start arguing the moment they meet and then sparks begin to fly. After spending a wonderful day and a rapturous night together, they part with promises to stay in touch. But things turn awry when Cole finds that Sadie has not responded to any of his texts since their last meeting. Paranoid about being ghosted, he discovers, by tracking the asthma inhaler he (unintentionally) left in her purse that she’s in London. Encouraged by his parents, Cole impulsively decides to cross the pond to surprise her with a “grand romantic gesture”. Not everything goes according to plan, however. Cole gets kidnapped by some henchmen who mistook him for ‘Taxman’, a legendary CIA field operative, the moment he lands in London. On the verge of getting tortured, he’s saved by Sadie, who turns out to be the Taxman. Together, Cole and Sadie travel to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, trying to flee from an organisation hunting down the Taxman to get to Aztec, a biomedical weapon of destruction. They must now survive together and Cole must try his best to make Sadie fall in love with him.
The crackling chemistry between Evans and de Armas
After playing rival agents in Russo Brothers’ espionage thriller The Gray Man, Evans and de Armas play a romantic pair in this fun spectacle — their third film together. They first appeared together in Rian Johnson’s Netflix movie Knives Out, clearly sparking off a connection despite being bitter rivals. In Ghosted, however, Evans and de Armas act as a foil to each other and risk their lives to save the ones they love. Evans’s Cole is a hopeless romantic in love with de Armas’s badass secret agent Sadie, who is afraid of falling in love. The tension of being in love runs through the plotline, squeezing every moment involving the lead pair to the fullest. As a running gag throughout the movie, everyone keeps telling Cole and Sadie, “You two should get a room,” pointing at their crackling chemistry.
Adrien Brody’s wacky supervillain
Former French secret agent Leveque, played by Academy Award winner Adrien Brody, runs a private terrorist organisation hunting down CIA operatives. Despite being presented as a classic baddie who wants to become super rich, Leveque’s wackiness draws laughter and amusement even in the grimmest moment. Prompting even gives a taste of what can go wrong on the job as an agent to lure the Taxman to join him (although he was still talking to the wrong person). Leveque’s one-liners to his lieutenant Wagner (Mike Moh) are hilarious and add to the fun.
Goofy action sequences
Goofy stunts are a must for any action comedy to work and Ghosted takes the cake in perfecting the hilariously absurd action sequences. When Sadie drives a multicoloured bus through the dangerous Khyber Pass, dodging a pack of highly trained criminals and attempting to protect an extremely panicked Cole, the absurdity of the situation along with the back and forth between the leads makes the audience giggle. The final showdown, backed by Bruno Mars’s Uptown Funk, is set to take place at a hip place — Cole and Sadie take on Leveque and a team of bounty-hunters, who will play a key part in the action that turns on its head, on top of a massive structure in a revolving restaurant that has lost its bearings and is spinning fast.
Star-studded cameos
Some of Chris Evans’s Marvel Cinematic Universe co-stars make brief appearances in Ghosted. Each of them plays assassins and spends some moments on screen before being assassinated by others of their ilk. After Sadie saves Cole, Leveque sets a USD 1 million bounty on the Taxman, luring bounty-hunters from all over the world. Evans’s Captain America pal Anthony Mackie enters the scene as a professional assassin and promptly gets shot down by John Cho's the Leopard, who himself is killed by another of Evans's Marvel buddies, Sebastian Stan, playing a bounty-hunter named God. The appearance and disappearance of these actors, one after another, comprise the funniest sequence in the film, demonstrating the competitiveness of the bounty-hunting profession. In the climactic action climax, Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds joins the party as former agent Jonas, who lost his left eye after falling in love with Sadie and has developed a taste for losing other body parts, including his genitals.
