Sadie Rhodes (Ana de Armas) drives through an intestate expressway to Washington DC that cuts through a lush forest, but her mind is not on nature’s grace that surrounds her speeding Subaru Forester (a clever, pun-ish product placement, if you ask me).

Sadie is mildly devastated. Her co-worker and friend, whom she met once, has died young and lonely; her only living connection was a plant in her home. Sadie, a natural beauty who one has trouble believing is single, is single, and she fears the same fate.

In an awkward, meet-cute moment by the writers of the film (it is definitely not), Sadie meets Cole Turner (Chris Evans), a good-natured farmer by circumstance, who helps his old folks run their farm.

Cole has a mild case of asthma and has never travelled out of the US. Sadie is an art curator who travels the world. Sparks fly and the two spend the next 24 hours together, as if living a moment from a Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan romantic dramedy.

Ghosted is an expensive and mediocre mess of a fi lm that survives on Chris Evans’ charisma alone

Then Sadie disappears, receiving his text messages, but not bothering to reply back. Cole has been ‘ghosted’, his sister (Lizze Broadway), who also lives at the farm, tells him — i.e. according to the new colloquial dating term, has been cut ties with.

Undeterred, Cole’s clingy nature gets the better of him and he decides to go to extreme stalker lengths in a matter of seconds. Tracking the inhaler he forgot to retrieve from her bag — because they can be tracked in today’s age — Cole travels to London because that’s where Sadie went.

The plot turns, though not as much as you’d think: Cole is abducted and knocked out by hoodlums. When he comes to, he finds himself in an underground cave being threatened by a suave B-movie spy-villain (Tim Blake Nelson) who calls him the ‘Taxman’, and plans to kill him with a murder hornet.

The flummoxed stalker-hero is baffled, and minutes later, his mind is blown when he is saved by Sadie, who — insert dull music of revelation here — is the aforementioned CIA agent called the ‘Taxman’.

The two run out of the cave, straight on to the Khyber Pass; yup, they’re in Pakistan — the still-bustling hub of terrorist activity in Hollywood’s squinted eyes.

Commandeering one of our multi-coloured buses from the locals, they ram and bam villains through the deadly narrow mountain pathways, arriving at Mingora.

It is during this skirmish that Ghosted shifts gears (pun-intended) into a globe-trotting spy-actioner whose cast adds Adrian Brody (playing another James Bond-ish suave villain stereotype), and bit part cameos by Sebastian Stan, Howard Mackie (ie. Evan’s Avengers co-stars), John Cho and Ryan Reynolds.

Ghosted is expensive, and its screenplay (written by Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers) is derivative, but not abysmal enough to make one want to turn the film off. The direction, and the technical decisions, however, leave no stone unturned to utterly ruin this predictable ho-hum mess.

Ghosted’s expensive action sequences are killed dead by bad camera and lens choices; the film hardly rises above the texture and frame sizes of a made-for-television movie (it is co-produced by Apple Studios for their platform, so that may be a reason).

As if the frames and the lenses didn’t make the film look flat, the colour grade, desaturated in tone and cold in contrast, makes the film look flatter.

The visuals take you out of what was already a forgettable romantic-spy cliché, hanging for dear life by Evan’s charisma alone. Throughout the runtime, de Armas just looks pretty. The actress, proficient in her action set-pieces, regularly throws her dialogues at her co-actor (rather than delivering them), while flashing her wide-eyed looks that have become a tired cliché of their own.

Dexter Fletcher’s direction is nothing to write home about as well.

Irrespective of its star-power and budget, Ghosted never rises above mediocre entertainment. Given the material at hand, maybe it was never meant to.

Produced by Skydance and Apple Studio and streaming on Apple TV+, Ghosted is rated PG-13, for brief scenes of love-making and action

Published in Dawn, ICON, May 7th, 2023