Give yourself a chance to respond to 'Ghosted'
Apple TV+
There’s a sequence midway through “Ghosted” that I could watch all day: A bounty hunter played by a cameoing movie star confidently finds and asserts his control over Sadie (Ana de Armas) and Cole (Chris Evans). A short time passes. Then another bounty hunter kills that bounty hunter and declares victory. And repeat. If a YouTube clip emerges of 15 more unused instances of this, I’m watching that video.
This is most worth mentioning because it reflects how Apple TV+’s “Ghosted,” a movie you likely have already assumed is terrible because of the 40,000 recent terrible movies about spies/assassins/etc., often finds the amusing, lighthearted tone that escapes most Netflix movies of the sort. Perhaps because this one is more comedy-action than action-comedy, which isn’t entirely enough to compensate for a pretty pale copy of a copy storyline, but enough to keep the intended smirk from flipping downwards.
Going where everything from “True Lies” to “This Means War” to “The Man From Toronto” have before, “Ghosted” finds Cole shocked to discover that Sadie is not an art curator who travels the world but rather a CIA agent whose expeditions more often find her escaping caves and planes than browsing galleries. Of course Leveque (de Armas’ “Blonde” co-star Adrien Brody) and his cronies mistakenly think Cole, not Sadie, is the legendary agent known as Taxman, and Cole and Sadie bounce between bickering and swooning. Again: If originality is your thing, you should already know you’re in the wrong place.
Yet both leads in “Ghosted” are pretty charming (it’s fun to see Captain America playing a scared doofus), and the movie is comfortably cartoonish, funnier than expected and even kinda cute: “Why didn’t you just ask me what the torturer was torturing me about?” Cole responds when Sadie questions why he didn’t share a certain piece of information sooner. When she discovers he secretly took a selfie of the two of them in bed to remember the moment and exclaims her disbelief that he took of a picture of her while she was sleeping, he replies, “Not of you! Of us!”
“Ghosted” isn’t zippy enough to become a new favorite for the “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” fans out there, but it’s also not brutal or crass, and director Dexter Fletcher (“Rocketman,” “Eddie the Eagle”) and the writers of “Zombieland” (woo) and “Deadpool” (boo) make contagious their own reasonable amount of fun. Put that on the poster!
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