YMMV / Ghosted (2023)

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Ryan Reynolds of all people crawls out of nowhere during the climax to banter a bit with Sadie, and crawls back there again shortly after.
• Complete Monster: Leveque is a former member of French intelligence who became a ruthless, arms-dealing terrorist, having his enemies assassinated or tortured by his henchman Borislov, even corrupting CIA agent Elena Reznik into working and killing for him. Seeking to sell the dangerous bioweapon "Aztec" to a high-profile buyer, Mr. Utami, to cause the deaths of millions for his own profit, Leveque has his men abduct and torture who he thinks is the legendary CIA operative "the Taxman" for the Aztec passcode. Indifferent when his men are slaughtered by the real "Taxman", aka Sadie Rhodes, Leveque has one of his own men Eaten Alive by bullet ants as a punishment for his failure and puts a bounty on Cole, resulting in several assassins killing each other just to bring him to Leveque. After Leveque makes multiple attempts on Sadie and Cole's lives, when Sadie sets up Cole to masquerade as the Taxman and meet Leveque and Utami at a restaurant to sell the weapon, Leveque has the CIA agents monitoring Cole killed and has his henchmen start a shootout to escape with Aztec, betraying and killing Utami and attempting to kill Sadie and Cole.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Burn Gorman has a pretty hilarious scene as a jovial London Cab Driver who is a massive Deadpan Snarker towards Cole's romance with Sadie and his "grand romantic gesture".
  • Tim Blake Nelson makes the most of his one scene by Chewing the Scenery as a sadistic Russian Torture Technician.
  • Marwan Kenzari plays wildly against type as Sadie's Australian, sex-obsessed ex and fellow agent, who lost a hand after she prioritized a mission over him (though he doesn't hold it against her.) He's only in one scene before he's killed by the first bounty hunter, setting off the chain reaction below.
  • Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, and John Cho have a memorable scene as a trio of bounty hunters who die in increasingly over-the-top ways.
  • Ryan Reynolds shows up during the final battle, talking to Sadie in the middle of the shootout.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • It's basically a Gender Flip of True Lies, with the secret agent half of the couple being a woman instead of a man this time, and the civilian other half who's ignorant of the secret agent's double life until The Reveal is a man this time.
  • It's also a gender-flipped version of Knight and Day, another romantic action comedy featuring a competent secret agent and their love interest, a hapless civilian, as they get swept up into a mission with a bio-weapon MacGuffin, lots of globetrotting, and the two leads constantly arguing over their relationship, albeit here the relationship is pre-established (even if they only went on one date) instead of them gradually falling in love with each other over the course of their adventure.
  • For folks who wanted more of Paloma, the CIA agent Ana de Armas played in No Time to Die, this is likely the closest they'll ever get to a spin-off movie about her (though the John Wick spin-off Ballerina is very likely to be more serious in that regard). She even wears a not too dissimilar black party dress when kicking ass at one point. As for the character being named "Sadie", well, spies have aliases, after all.^note It would be far from the first time a media featuring an actor who appeared in a James Bond film intentionally appears to make an association with said role, with The Rock heavily implying that Sean Connery's character is his incarnation of James Bond, or George Lazenby (the actor who played Bond once in On Her Majesty's Secret Service) as an unnamed secret agent wearing a white tuxedo and driving an Aston Martin DB5 with "JB" on the number plate (and is credited as "JB") in The Return of The Man From U.N.C.L.E..
• Strangled by the Red String: While the relationship between Cole and Sadie was established beforehand and the performances of Chris Evans and Ana de Armas were praised, a few critics have asserted that their chemistry together left much to be desired. Hilariously, much of those same critics actually believed that in the last movie they were in (in which the relationship was antagonistic) they had far better chemistry than in this film, which was supposed to be a foray in the romantic genre.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: A number of reviewers negatively compared the movie to its spiritual predecessors True Lies and Knight and Day, stating that the film rehashes plot points from these and lacks true originality. In addition, while the Gender Flip aspect may also have been seen as a fresh perspective several years before this movie was produced, at the time it came out the pairing of an Action Girl with a Distressed Dude had become too common in mainstream media to be considered a unique selling point anymore. At the same time, though, a good amount of reviewers have considered it to be a nice Genre Throwback.

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