One Hell of a Second Date
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to movie theaters, even as I’ll have to sacrifice seeing wonders like The Pope’s Exorcist (Julius Avery).
Before we start, though, here are a couple of follow-ups from my previous posting, taking us back into the realm of pro-basketball along with some sad commentary about Oakland, CA professional baseball. First, as for the (San Francisco) Golden State Warriors, I was a bit hasty in bemoaning their demise last time as the NBA playoffs continue with the teams first tied at 2 games apiece (need best 4 of 7) with the neighboring Sacramento Kings so I’ll just have to patiently wait to see how it all plays out over the next week, but it's looking good for the Warriors who now have a 3-2 lead. With revived hopes for the Warriors, I’ll toss in a couple of links I forgot about last week when reviewing Air (Ben Affleck) about Michael Jordan and Nike: this one exploring how the 1984 setting connects with our branding obsessions of today, plus comments by screenwriter Alex Convery. But as for my beloved Oakland Athletics baseballers the situation’s not looking good at all as their skinflint (where players’ salaries are concerned) billionaire owner, John Fisher (who inherited The Gap fortune from his parents), is set to purchase land in Las Vegas to build a stadium there, move the team in the next few years. Certainly the A’s need a new ballpark (the Coliseum’s been around since 1968) and bigger crowds, but when you’re fielding a team with little hope of success (current record’s 5-20, absolute worst in the Majors) in a facility with sewage problems you can’t expect more than the dedicated core to show up. We’ll see how this plays out, but the A’s seem headed to the desert in a few years. 👉ALERT! I’ve quite a few things I’m trying to keep up with this coming weekend so there may not be a Film Reviews from Two Guys in the Dark posting next week (5/3/2023). I’ll try to get something in if I can, even if very short, but if not I’ll be back the following week.
Ghosted (Dexter Fletcher) rated PG-13 116 min.
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: Cole Turner (Chris Evans) lives somewhere near Washington, D.C., on a farm he runs with his parents (Tate Donovan, Amy Sedaris) and sister Mattie (Lizze Broadway), then sells some of their crops in a local farmers’ market where one day his plant-seller-stall-neighbor, Claudia Yates (Anna Deavere Smith), asks him to watch her stuff while she goes off on a pot break (not what you put plants in, but with enough relaxation from this kind of herb she might occasionally break one of those plant pots accidently). Up comes Sadie Rhodes (Ana de Armas), looking for a plant that needs little attention because as an art curator (her story) she’s often not home for days at a time, sometimes on projects around the globe. Their conversation quickly becomes a bit caustic, he finally says she should just buy a cactus, but she takes something else from the plant proprietor when Claudia returns from her break. However, as Sadie walks away Cole goes with her, they keep chatting, end up spending the afternoon, evening, and night together, so when Cole gets home he’s convinced he’s found the love of his life, although that doesn’t seem to be panning out when she doesn’t reply to his texts. His sarcastic sister thinks she’s “ghosting” him (rejecting connection), but his more-optimistic-parents say he should travel to London to surprise her as he knows she’s there from the inhaler he accidently left in her bag (Huh?) which has an active tracker on it (Double huh?).
He goes, follows the signal to the Tower of London/Tower Bridge location, but when he arrives he’s kidnapped by 3 thugs who think he’s the “Taxman” who has the passcode for Aztec, the biochemical weapon of mass destruction they’ve recently stolen. However, just as he’s about to be tortured for info he doesn’t even have, Sadie bursts in, dispatches the thugs, admits she’s with the CIA and she’s Taxman, working with Agency resources to recapture the dangerous device. Leaving the torture room, they run through an underground tunnel before more assassins arrive, yet when they exit they’re in Afghanistan. (OK, now we can reasonably assume the screenplay’s a result of sections of various drafts cut and pasted together with no final editing, so at least we don’t have to pay much attention to plot points [always a welcome situation when you’re having cocktails at home during streaming].) After escaping more trouble they learn their chief antagonist is Leveque (Adrien Brody), who reminds me a bit of Belloq (Paul Freeman), the chief villain in Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981) which Ghosted seems to draw allusions from, though to considerably less success.
In a nearby town they meet Marco (Marwan Kenzari), Sadie’s former lover who quietly tells Cole she’s much more committed to her career than any relationship, but before Marco can take Cole safely back home they’re attacked by a pack of bounty hunters as Leveque’s put a price on Cole’s head, still mistakenly thinking he’s Taxman. Basically, the bounty hunters kill each other in the ensuing chaos, then Sadie uses Cole as bait to get Aztec, turning him over to Leveque who puts them on a plane with the locked Aztec briefcase. More fighting follows with Cole parachuting off the plane with Aztec and wounded Sadie. They land on Socotra Island (part of Yemen in the Indian Ocean) where Cole uses local plants to nurse Sadie back to health before more of Leveque’s thugs arrive, make off with Aztec as U.S. Marines rescue our stars. ⇒Back at CIA HQ Sadie’s taken off the case for endangering Cole, but he helps figure out the passcode, agrees to continue as Taxman to meet Leveque at a revolving restaurant on a tower, seemingly to sell the passcode but truly to retrieve Aztec. While there he also meets Leveque’s deadly buyer, Mr. Utami (Stephen Park), who’s planning to kill all involved if he doesn’t get the weapon. Leveque has his thugs kill the CIA agents secretly backing up Cole, Sadie appears and sells the passcode to Leveque for $10 million, then immediately puts it all as a bounty on Leveque so bounty hunters arrive (of course), seemingly out of thin air. More chaos (of course, but Cole turns into quite a combatant as this plot progresses so maybe he’s somehow channeling his unknown Captain America heritage), Leveque kills Utami, bullets damage the restaurant greatly speeding up its revolution, the killer device is out of its case tossed around a bit like a football until Sadie catches it, throws Leveque through a window to his death. Later, Sadie and Cole are having dinner with his family as they’re now clearly connected.⇐
So What? As I slightly detail in the next portion of this review, despite near-consistent-critical-warning to stay away from Ghosted I had a couple of reasons to be intrigued by its premise: One is the star-quality of its lead actors with Evans always a determined force to be reckoned with in the many Avengers movies and de Armas very successful (at least in my opinion, despite some critical distain) as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde (Andrew Dominik, 2022; review in our October 6, 2022 posting [begins with other Oakland A’s commentary about a more-positive-situation]) which earned her Best Actress/Female Actor in a Leading Role noms from both the Oscars Academy and the Screen Actors Guild (Brody’s always a delight as well, with his sophisticated-villainy fun to watch at least until all hell breaks loose in the fight scenes); two is a recent interest in seeing something about government spies after watching an episode of a PBS TV miniseries, My Grandparents’ War, where actor Kit Harington talks about/researches one set of his grandparents who were spies for Great Britain during WW II's horrid conflict, so even though Ghosted uses a secret-agent-premise largely as an excuse for Evans and de Armas to dispose of a small army of attackers (but not in a gruesome fashion, in order to preserve that family-friendly-rating) it still was mildly satisfying in more of a James Bond-saves-the-world-race-and-battle-to-the-finish than something more sophisticated in the premise of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011; review in our January 6, 2012 posting).
Sure, there’s a lot of convenient coincidence here (as if omission of that trope wouldn’t shut down a vast majority of what we see on any size screen) beginning with a tracker on his inhaler that gets Cole to London in the first place, along with (as I’ll note from another review below) that absurd scene where Cole and Sadie run through a tunnel in London, then emerge far across the planet in Afghanistan with no attempt to explain how in the hell that happened—unless they first came out in London, somehow took transport to the Middle East, then went back into another tunnel (?). But logic and proportion aren’t exactly key elements here; it’s more about dangerous surprise on his part followed by how he’ll survive horrible situations, set-ups for interpersonal combat scenes for both of them, then a resolution that reminds me in small ways of how Bond (with crucial help Sadie and Cole could have used here) lives another day in his triumph in Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton, 1964). Those fight scenes and the finale in the revolving restaurant are all well-choreographed, the whole thing moves along at an energetic pace, and Sadie becomes a more-complex-character than you might first assume as she struggles with herself about using Cole to accomplish her critical mission while trying not to be caught up in an attraction to him. Yes, it’s fair to say this movie is the very definition of escapist fare, but if life is running you ragged maybe a respite like this will be welcome, in the vein of Billy Joel's "You May Be Right" (on his 1980 Glass Houses album): “You may be right / I may be crazy / oh, but it just may be a lunatic / You’re looking for.” No, you don’t have to be a lunatic to find some redeeming value in Ghosted, you just have to be willing to settle for much less than marvelous.
Bottom Line Final Comments: A new COVID variant's now in CA (and other parts of the world), further limiting my interest in a theater auditorium filled with other patrons (most likely not-masked), so even though it breaks my heart to not watch The Super Mario Bros. Movie (Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic) and Evil Dead Rise (Lee Cronin) I’ll just have to soldier on without them—speaking of soldiers, though, at some point on streaming I’d be interested in Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant and maybe the latest Dracula rendition, Renfield (Chis McKay), just to see how Nicholas Cage (a seeming natural for a contemporary-twist on his role) conveys the undead Count while Beau Is Afraid (Ari Aster) is mildly interesting due to the always-intriguing-presence of Joaquin Phoenix, yet I’m not sure I really need to see a minute short of 3 hours of him. Therefore, it was back to the streaming options last weekend which didn’t offer much in my interest-realm (a few things that could be possibilities from theatrical release haven’t come to streaming yet), so what I ended up with was Ghosted with a grim OCCU response of almost-off-the-charts-negativity—Rotten Tomatoes with a mere 29% positive reviews, Metacritic with their marginally-better 35% average score—not because I wanted to waste my time with such a maligned-movie but because I’ve always enjoyed the work of its primary stars (along with the little-spy-connection I've noted in the previous section of this review).
I can’t say that there’s a lot of substance going on here, although I find the chemistry—once it reconnects from that first date—between the principals to be plausible (with, if nothing else, consistent reason to keep looking at either of them), despite rejections on that topic as well (say several including Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle [another reason I decided to give this movie a try, in that I often find some value in material he dismisses]): “Obviously, ‘Ghosted’ is not a movie to see — unless you are absolutely in love with Chris Evans or Ana de Armas or both (the two also appeared together in 2019's ‘Knives Out’). They’re attractive and charming, but here they play characters that make no sense, and sometimes, even in a throwaway entry like this, sense matters.”
This makes yet another time when I feel that Mick and the rest of the OCCU have gone overboard with rejections, but in that you can only access this movie through Apple TV+ streaming (no extra charge beyond the subscription fee) it won’t cost you anything (even if you’re not a subscriber you can get a 7-day-free-trial) except about 2 hours of your time, so I’ll leave it to your curiosity if you want to consider watching it. Or, you can just listen to my usual end-of-review-Musical Metaphor, which could be “You Don’t Know Me” (written in 1955 by Eddy Arnold and Cindy Walker, recorded by dozens) which is what Cole quickly finds out about Sadie, but I’ve already used it 5 times (OK, if you must hear it again, how about #6 being Willie Nelson's version, from his 2006 You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker album) or George Harrison's "Taxman" (from The Beatles’1966 album Revolver), both of which you’re welcome to hear, but the official selection has to be Johnny Rivers’ “Secret Agent Man” (on his 1966 … And I Know You Wanna Dance) at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=6iaR3WO71j4 because it’s as upbeat about doom and death as this movie is about beating up or killing a parade of would-be-assassins, so these moods'll harmonize effectively for me.
SHORT TAKES
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
(1) Oscar dates for 2024 (awards 3/10); (2) Actors' Union supports Scriptwriters' Union for potential strike; (3) Upcoming sci-fi and fantasy movies and TV series this year and into 2024.
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