Maybe the studios could afford to pay writers a living wage if they didn’t give the writers of “Deadpool” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home” several million dollars for something that an AI could pump out for the price of a free prompt.
With Apple and Amazon both pledging to invest upwards of a billion dollars into big-budget theatrical releases that will presumably be made to a higher standard, there’s reason to hope that “Ghosted” will be the last time a Netflix competitor spends a fortune on an instantly disposable straight-to-streaming action movie that wastes a fun group of actors on some bad Atlanta green screen and a script that feels like it was written by ChatGPT (alas, we’re getting an “Extraction 2” no matter what).
If anything, “Ghosted” is just happy to evoke the concept of entertainment in the hopes that some pretty faces and a familiar arrangement of flashing lights might be enough to convince the stock market that Apple is investing its money rather than just pissing it into the wind. If we’re lucky, however, “Ghosted” might also represent the final whimper before a mutual retreat. Directed by Dexter Fletcher with all the style and fun that he brought to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” this gender-swapped riff on “The Spy Who Dumped Me” was shot like a car commercial, lazily borrows from an obvious litany of actual Hollywood blockbusters, and constantly betrays the fact that it was made without any real financial interest in actually being good. Lighter on its feet and less agonizing than last summer’s “The Gray Man” (despite sharing two key cast members with the Russo brothers’ $200 million spy-v.-spy slog), “ Ghosted” nevertheless manages to feel like a model casualty of the recent content wars. ‘Chile ’76’ Review: A Rich Housewife Becomes a Reluctant Spy in Manuela Martelli’s Shrewd Pinochet-Era Thriller
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