GHOSTED
ZERO STARS/****
starring Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Mike Moh, Adrien Brody
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Dexter Fletcher
THE MOTHER
**/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Joseph Fiennes
screenplay by Misha Green and Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig
directed by Niki Caro
by Walter Chaw Two new entries in the woman-warrior subgenre of action pictures find a pretty abysmal knock-off of Knight and Day in the Ana de Armas vehicle Ghosted (with villain Adrien Brody doing a weird accent) and a pretty fair knock-off of Hanna in the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Mother (with villain Joseph Fiennes doing a different weird accent). The one is ultimately a half-assed romcom, the other a grim survivalist ex-military Stella Dallas melodrama. They share a queasy desperation, as well as a sense that they’ve lapped their respective sell-by dates by at least a full creative cycle. It’s that feeling where you recognize someone at the party who hasn’t been invited, and they know you know but no one wants to say anything. The best modern iterations of this kind of movie are Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight and James Cameron’s Aliens. I wonder if my overall fatigue with the genre isn’t a product of my searching for those highs again in the intervening, largely disappointing decades. Part of me feels like I should celebrate non-IP attempts at mature actioners–but the rest of me feels like I’d rather be watching something that doesn’t suck. It’s the eternal struggle.
Dexter Fletcher’s Ghosted features woebegone loser Cole Turner (Chris Evans, I think–one of the Chrises, anyway; who gives a shit?) lamenting his atrocious romantic track record while lucking into a date with whimsical, impossibly beautiful and quirky dreamgirl Sadie (de Armas) as she’s shopping for a houseplant to fill her lonesome life. If, right off the bat, you’re having a tough time visualizing people who look like Evans and de Armas as hapless loners, well, hell, that’s just the first thing that’s insufferable about what is possibly the most annoying movie I’ve seen in a year that includes films by Zach Braff and Dave Franco & Alison Brie. I don’t know why de Armas is doing this hard pivot to action star, but more power to her, I guess. Here, she’s an international superspy known only as “The Tax Man.” If you presume this leads to a parade of special celebrity guest-star villains singing the Beatles song when they think they’ve captured “The Tax Man,” have you ever considered writing a screenplay for a big-budget piece of shit? Anyway, a one-night stand leads to Cole getting clingy, hence earning his “ghosting” from Sadie. Undaunted, Cole traces his inhaler to Sadie’s purse in London, where he becomes accidentally embroiled in her action hijinks. It crossed my mind briefly that Sadie is a shitty fucking spy if she can be tracked all over the world by the contents of her purse–the sort of thing you think about when a movie doesn’t give you anything else to do.
Fighting. A MacGuffin changes hands. More fighting. Lots of dreary “romantic” banter so deadening it halts the movie entirely, even in the middle of explosions and crashing planes and stuff. More fighting. Banter, rinse, repeat; don’t let it get in your eyes. I don’t have the energy to pretend it matters or that anyone cares what happens in Ghosted, the very definition of a film you watch when you’re doing housework because it doesn’t really matter how much you miss. It’s like a train that goes in a small circle: Get on when you want–every stop is within walking distance. Isn’t that the purpose of these lumbering streambusters? Do Cole and Sadie end up together? Yes. Is there a set-up for more adventures? Sure. Are the fights somehow both flaccid and overstuffed? Yes. Is there chemistry between the leads? There’s more chemistry between two hot dogs sitting next to each other in a gas-station water bath. Ghosted is an egregious waste of time and resources and curiously depressing for the fact of it. You could maybe take something from this conversation around Cole’s whinging, his creepy stalker behaviour, his obsessive neediness, though I can’t imagine what it might be.
Better by virtue of its crimes being more its rote familiarity and less its excruciating unwatchability, Niki Caro’s The Mother, from a story by Misha Green and time immemorial, is one of those action flicks where former military supersoldiers go into hiding only to be teased back into the field by some worn plot device. This time, it’s The Mother (Jennifer Lopez), pulled out of the cold to protect her secret daughter, Zoe (Lucy Paez), when Zoe is kidnapped by Eurotrash creep Adrian (Joseph Fiennes). Zoe is the worst-kept secret in the history of badly-kept secrets, you see, as everyone seems to know her mother is The Mother no matter how urgently The Mother stress-whispers her dialogue the way Jennifer Lopez does when she’s thesping real hard. Her delivery of even the most mundane lines is not unlike that thing where you let air out of a balloon by stretching its mouth into a thin, terse, white-lined opening. It’s easy to mistake fervid intensity for serious acting, but some 30 years into her career in front of the camera, I’m wondering if Jenny from the Block is as exhausted doing it as I am watching it. I swear to God, I feel like a “Ben Affleck so sad so tired” meme. Zoe is also played awfully young for a 12-year-old, spending most of her time shrieking and making bad decisions about wildlife. That is, until she learns how to snipe like her mom (by shooting CDs hung from trees, in what I took as a weird metatextual shot at J.Lo’s other career), and at the moment of crisis… Is it still a spoiler if everyone knows what I’m about to say?
Pretty much all you need to know about The Mother is that it takes itself extremely seriously and contains needle-drops like Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” and Massive Attack’s “Angel” but somehow not The Chromatics‘ cover of “Running Up That Hill” or This Mortal Coil‘s “Song to the Siren.” Opportunity missed! To be clear, I didn’t hate The Mother. I like those songs, I like moody, greyscale cinematography and J.Lo playing a brass-tacks backwoods Alaskan badass who harvests elk. (“It’s a stag,” she whispers urgently, “so more like Bambi’s dad.”) She forcefully whisper-tells sympathetic Fed Cruise (Omari Hardwick)–whose superpower appears to be getting shot a lot until dead, finally, for his incompetence and not making any emotional ripple in the process–that she saved his life because he offered her a cup of water while interrogating her and, because she was pregnant, she could tell he was a man worth saving the one time (but not the next couple of times, I guess). And she bravely bites back a sob when Zoe finally screeches “Mom!” at her. It ends with the revelation that The Mother is prepared to spend the rest of her life engaged in constant surveillance of her adopted-by-a-normal-family baby like Pink Floyd‘s mom, but because this is The Mother, it’s a metaphor for how mothers are always there for their kids. Always. Forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. Whisper it urgently with me.
