A great cast doesn’t automatically translate to a great movie. The lineup could be stacked with all the award winners, the nicest, most beautiful, fresh-faced or seasoned actors in the industry and it can still be a flop. Like any vehicle, good actors need more than just a steering wheel to travel any distance. It takes a motor, fuel, and at the very least, wheels to get the car moving. The best actors in the business can put their full A-game, vroom vroom energy down on the pedal but without the other components, emoting on cue can only get them so far. Especially in an action movie. Ghosted threw a lot of money at an attractive cast and called it a day. I wouldn’t be surprised it they farmed the remaining divisions out to high school film clubs – although the quality of some high school film products is actually in a higher tier.
It’s farmers’ market day and 6-foot-something, jacked, blue-eyed farmer Cole (Chris Evans) is manning the houseplant booth. If this isn’t the start to a high budget porno then I’m an uncultured hermit. Cole, believably saddled with the highly believable nickname, Coleslaw, by the parents he voluntarily lives with, offers to help a beautiful, mysterious, exotic young woman with her begonia. They bicker over the plant’s maintenance requirements before the woman,
named Sadie (Ana de Armas), storms off. It’s only after Cole’s booth neighbour, returning high from a joint break, remarks on their imperceptible sexual tension that Cole runs after Sadie, jumps in her car, and they have the longest first date in history. Cole goes home a man in love, but Sadie is conspicuously absent; she ghosts him (stops replying to his numerous messages) and escapes to London. The obvious next step is for the wholesome, all-American 10 who definitely isn’t an obsessed creep to track Sadie’s exact location, get on a plane, go to said location, and immediately get kidnapped by the shady villains who mistake him for her. An honest error, to be sure. Sadie, it turns out, is a CIA agent who now must complete her mission while babysitting Farmer Coleslaw who’s dangling off the bus roof like he’s never been in a highspeed chase before.
Cole and Sadie are plastic parodies of action heroes, but I don’t think it’s Evans and de Armas’ fault; they do the very best that they can with the available material. Like giving a scientist a glass of lake water and some tweezers and asking them to make it drinkable. Cole and Sadie are forced together by the kind of script writing you only see on posterboards at a protest. Their relationship blossoms out of the romance of montage and then dissolves into nearly two hours of arguments – probably because one is a farmer who’s been kidnapped and the other is a CIA agent trying desperately to save the world with a man-child strapped to her hip. Why. Predictably, they fall in love despite their atypical situation – at least I’m told they’re in love by every supporting character who points out the sexual tension. Hint: if you need to point it out, it probably isn’t obvious enough to warrant a mention.
On the antagonist side, Adrien Brody 
tries, he really tries to make something of his role and he nearly gets there. His character, the token bad guy, comes off as someone who got lost on his way to a Muppets casting. It really isn’t fair. Other big names also pop up in Ghosted but I’m convinced their cameos are a desperate ploy to keep us from losing interest.
Of course, this is an action movie, so we must assume that the chase scenes and fights are worth it, right? I thought that CGI had come a long way, especially green screens, but somehow, for some reason, Ghosted takes us back a few decades. The special effects are on par with arcade game graphics and look even worse behind terrible lighting. It’s a washed-out blur, like someone fogged up 
the camera and squeegeed around Evans’ and de Armas’ profiles.
I don’t get it. Do some studios have too much money to spend? Is it a blackmail thing? Evans, de Armas, blink twice if you need rescuing. Ghosted spirals out of control – I mean literally climbs to the top of a rotating restaurant, trips, and sends the motor into hyper speed. Menus and our well-dressed heroes go flying everywhere, but there’s still time for a victory smooch as the centrifugal force romantically presses them up against the remaining windows. Ghosted is a hot mess, despite the best efforts of its cast. They claw and scrape for the few points it deserves and land this unoriginal action movie at a 3/10.
Plenty of Popcorn 