The streamers have made the following type of movie a small-screen staple: the mistaken identity spy action romantic comedy. What? Too many genres for you? Don’t tell that to Netflix and AppleTV+, which in the past two years have given us Red Notice, The Gray Man, The Man from Toronto and now Ghosted. The first three of those are on Netflix, but AppleTV+ has gotten into the game now with this Chris Evans–Ana de Armas vehicle. And even if not all of those genre components are evident in each of those movies, they feel an awful lot alike – especially since both Evans and de Armas were in The Gray Man. (Plus, spoiler alert, in Ghosted there’s a small and entirely superfluous cameo from Ryan Reynolds, star of Red Notice.)

It’s an interesting shift in the cinematic business model for the streamers to acknowledge that these movies don’t belong on the big screen. Oh, they might say this is the ultimate display of their ability to compete with the offerings at your local multiplex, but truth be told, even with the presence of big stars and big action shootouts, these movies stink of small-screen desperation. Ghosted is particularly chintzy in that regard, boasting TV movie credits, and needle drops that may have cost a pretty petty for licensing, but are employed curiously and reflect no sense of the popular music landscape as it exists in 2023.

The supposedly clever premise of Ghosted is that a man (Evans) follows the woman with whom he had one magical night (de Armas) after she fails to return his texts – and discovers she’s a spy. “Wowzers!” as Inspector Gadget would have said. In other words, that’s hardly clever at all. It was already the premise of the equally unsuccessful comedy from a couple years ago The Spy Who Dumped Me, plus certainly a half-dozen others I won’t deign to try to remember. It’s quite clear that someone decided “Ghosted” would make a good name for a movie – you know, it’s what all the kids are saying these days – and lazily reverse-engineered a plot to go with the title.

Cole Turner swears he’s not a stalker. (And with that name, he sounds a lot more like a spy himself.) But he did leave a tracking device on the asthma inhaler he accidentally left in the bag of Sadie Rhodes on the night they were out together, an action he took because he’s always losing things and wants to be able to find them using an app on his phone. It’s doubtful that he needed to get this particular inhaler back – I believe you can buy them for twenty bucks – but using the app does help him determine that Sadie is currently in London, which is weird because they live in Washington D.C. Convincing himself it is a grand romantic gesture and she hasn’t returned his texts because she doesn’t have an international phone plan (as if), he tracks her bag to London – where he finds himself confused for a spy named the Taxman, kidnapped by thugs, and needing to be rescued by Sadie, who comes in guns blazing.

Maybe – and this is a stretch – maybe if you had never seen any sort of film like this before, Ghosted would seem original. But nearly every one of your standard romantic comedies is based on some sort of misunderstanding, and just adding a bunch of second-rate action stuff to it does not make the whole premise any more interesting.

This misbegotten lot of recent streaming premieres even rip off the same movies. There’s an extended sequence in Red Notice where so much is stolen from Raiders of the Lost Ark, they feel they even need to name check the movie to ease some of their guilt. There’s no name-checking in Ghosted, but there is a chase aboard a moving truck that is such an homage to Raiders – we’ll use the generous term “homage” there – that there’s even a moment when a villain is hanging on to the front grille of the truck, its individual spokes popping off in his hands one at a time.

Because the streamers can throw around a lot of money, they get the big stars, and at first glance, Evans and de Armas seem like smart choices. Evans does a lot of things well, but in this role it’s rather too obvious he isn’t Ryan Reynolds – who at least makes misfires interesting with his smartass quips. De Armas may be getting her first taste of overexposure, because that certain something she’s contributed to even her lesser efforts just feels swallowed up by this movie. It’s a train derailing from the start and she isn’t hanging on very well.

As with most of these similar movies, it’s not so much that they are godawful but just that they are woefully under-inspired. Ghosted tries for a few things, and on occasion it hits. More often, the impression is of not quite hitting on semi-decent ideas, and an inconsistency of tone. One potentially good gag – borrowed also as it may be from something like Deadpool – is a sequence where the two leads fall in and out of the custody of different bounty hunters, each of whom is on screen for about two minutes before being unceremoniously offed in some gruesome way. Each of these bounty hunters is played by a major star, most of whom share some kind of career history with Evans. The fact that this sequence doesn’t have a big impact demonstrates the way Ghosted is consistently less than.

Ghosted is directed by Dexter Fletcher, who gets the credit for pushing best picture nominee Bohemian Rhapsody past the finish line after Bryan Singer was fired from it, and bearing the sole credit for the similar Elton John biopic Rocketman. In a mistaken identity spy action romantic comedy, he’s just totally out of his element – which could be because his collection of raw materials, paid for though they may be, contain no element of surprise for the viewer.

 

Ghosted is currently streaming on AppleTV+.