Ghosted Deserves To Be Roasted

Ghosted(Apple TV +)

Rating: 0  stars

Just as there  are laws  against  squandering water and fuel in many countries, there should be  laws against the kind of paychecks that A-list stars in Bollywood and Hollywood carry home  for  doing practically nothing.

For,  nothing is  what Chris Evans and Ana de Armas, two insanely  beautiful stars  looking lost in the  creepy chaos of stalking and  binge-assaulting the audiences’ senses  with  nonsense, seems  to have signed  up for.

Did they even read the script? Did they  know what they were getting into? Or  were the zeros  on their paycheques all  they could see?

The sad part of this  vulgar piece of  jejune anaemic cinema is that both the leads are  capable  of good acting. But hell, what can they do when they have nothing to fall back on except their own  charm? It’s like Arijit Singh being told to sing into  a  trashcan.

There is absolutely no room for any kind of  creative discourse in this  cauldron  of  nothingness which starts with Evans  and  Armis hooking up for a day and not of carnal pleasures. Funnily their love making  interlude is  so  chaste it looks like they have signed up for a full-body MRI rather than full-bodied sex.

Sadie(de Armis) disappears  after this  daylong date.Maybe the  vegetarian sex  clinched  it. But  off she went .And so, I suggest, should  the  audience before it is  too late. Sucker that we are for goodlooking people colliding and collapsing in a heap of mutual passion, we  refuse  to heed early signs of braindead writing and  chug on to  see what waits for us  next in this hideous display of  cinematic anarchy.

 Cole(Evans) refuses to listen  to his  wise parents end even wiser sister(a  superb  Lizze Broadway)and flies off to  London  to  track down Sadie. He carries a  cactus plant as a  peace offering(it is  supposed to be a  joke),  gets mugged  in a  dark corner and  is tortured by a  villain who looks  suspiciously  like Adrien Brody.

Surprise  surprise, it is  Brody!! What  got into him? Bills to pay, perhaps? The love story between Cole and Sadie  is  forgotten while we are  treated to one action piece after another. The one in a speeding bus in Pakistan(?)  gets the  prize for being the  most over-the-top.

  The  self-congratulatory tone and  tempo of  the action is  not  the least impressive. Armis  playing  Evans’  protector is  meant to be  a cool gender reversal  in the action genre. Evans seems to  enjoy being mollycoddled. But the  couple is so mismatched they look like  Will Smith and  Jaden Smith after the Oscarslap.

 Every now  and then  some character  has to remind  them, “You two should get a room.”

And do what? Fight some more? The PG stuff that  Armis  and Evans pass off as passion is as sizzling as  an ice cream  cone melting in the sun. Ghosted  is the movie equivalent  of a blind date  botched up by a restaurant  that serves  only vegetarian food to incurable meat eaters.

Avoid Ghosted like the plague.Even the plague  is  preferable. At least it  causes some sensation.