If you want to draw your viewers into an expensive, global action film, you’d better let your guns do the talking. This rule always applies, in the cinema and even more so, due to the risk of switching, with the streaming portals. Strict success algorithms, it seems, are now watching over the old James Bond recipe: that there has to be a big bang before the first film title is even displayed.
Anyone who does it differently must have strong nerves, and that’s why the beginning of “Ghosted” is a small gesture of resistance. So Apple TV+, with the self-image of the smaller, finer, more progressive streamer, ordered the usual once-around-the-world banging from Skydance, the makers of “Mission Impossible” and “Top Gun: Maverick”.
But what do you see at the beginning? A young woman at a Washington farmer’s market who argues and flirts with the farmer behind the flower stand and then spends a seemingly never-ending sunny day with him, and eventually even a night.
That’s how romantic comedies start, and the message is probably that feelings are taken seriously here. Farmer Cole worries about his parents and his crops and hopes maybe a little too much to meet “the one” – Chris Evans tries hard to make us forget his past as “Captain America”. And Ana de Armas as Sadie, dissatisfied with her anything-to-do-art job and fed up with constantly jetting around the world, looks genuinely quite in love.
Chris Evans plays a pawn. More precisely: a pawn sacrifice
Big downer, then, when she suddenly no longer answers and Cole sends a few sayings and emojis into space, so Sadie “ghosts” him, as it’s called today (hence the title). As everyone from the trailer already knows, that’s because Sadie is actually a CIA-trained killing machine who can’t constantly reveal her location via smartphone. And when Cole makes the mistake of traveling after her, he’s in such the wrong place at the wrong time that he’s mistaken for a top agent himself and is kidnapped. As, well, pawn sacrifice.
Sadie then has to free him and dazzle him with her killer skills, and when you get knocked out in London in a movie like this, it’s easy to wake up in the Hindu Kush. So it’s around the world, nasty villains always on the heels, a deadly super weapon and a secret code want to be obtained, corpses pave their way. Of course, this only works with the necessary callousness, with protagonists and viewers alike, but at the same time the film also recognizes how boring this attitude has become, endless genre standard.
So came director Dexter Fletcher, who previously made the queenfilm “Bohemian Rhapsody” and then shot Elton John into a new orbit as “Rocketman”, probably on the idea of occasionally throwing a spanner in the works. When the farmer is horrified about what the killer is doing in her job. His bewilderment ties in with the romantic beginning and often throws her – and everyone else – off course. Only briefly, of course, this is and remains a shooter, but still.
What in turn motivates male filmmakers to stage the petite Cuban exile Ana de Armas either as a wide-eyed victim (“Blonde”, “Blade Runner 2049”) or as an invincible killing machine is also worth analyzing. Since her submachine gun and karate skills assisting James Bond in ‘No Time To Die’, she’s had to play the same role over and over again, including in ‘The Gray Man’ (a rival Netflix around-the-world banger, too with Chris Evans) and now here.
Always there, even in the Bond film, the American secret service CIA is her employer. Maybe that has historical reasons, Cuban exiles were always welcome at the CIA, keyword “Bay of Pigs”. But maybe Ana just feels committed to her last name. After all, Armas means weapons.
Ghosted, USA 2023 – Director: Dexter Fletcher. Book: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers. Camera: Salvatore Totino. Starring Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody. Sky dance, 116 minutes. On Apple TV+. Streaming start: April 21, 2023.