Films like this feel like practical jokes. Like, hey, there’s people out there who pay real close attention to the names attached to movies, so let’s bring a bunch of them together. We’ll get the guy who directed Rocketman, the writers of the Deadpool and MCU Spider-Man movies, and we’ll get Mindy Marin to work her usual magic and cast all kinds of hot acting talent for it, led by Chris Evans and Ana De Armas. Apparently, the strategy worked, as this set a new record for debut audience numbers on Apple TV+. Of course, first appearances aren’t everything, and it takes little more than a light breeze to scratch the paint off of this bafflingly awful product.
Director Dexter Fletcher has built a solid pedigree for more inspirational cinema like Eddie The Eagle and the aforementioned Rocketman, but hoo boy, is he out of his league trying to deliver an action-adventure flick. Even with the story’s rom-com underpinnings, taking an already-contrived setup and just blowing up across a map, his and DP Salvatore Totino’s framing of the story feels so small. It doesn’t help that the transitioning between locations feels like the audience (and the characters) are just being picked up and dropped wherever the plot requires them to be. The action’s pretty bland too, save for a decent finale set in a revolving restaurant.
Pretty sure even 87North-tier action would have been able to save this
script, though. It is truly disappointing to see Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick
steadily get worse and worse with each new script they put out, as the slope
from Deadpool 2 to here is steep. They’re still on their
meta-referential kick, taking the piss out of these kinds of spy capers, but
the end result is pretty dire. At best, it nudges into the unfortunate
behaviour of acting like the characters in the story are above the story
they’re actively involved in, which isn’t a great look. And at worst… well,
when it gets to the point of three recognisable faces being introduced in
rapid succession, with each getting killed off right after each other, it made me relive a similar gag done in Seltzerberg’s Disaster Movie. Not even joking.
Nor are the main characters. Evans and de Armas are good picks to be the leads in an action movie, but like so many of the other names attached to this, they don’t work so well in this one. The characterisation for the both of them is just really unlikeable, between de Armas as the hardened secret agent with a trail of damaged exes in her wake, and Evans being mesmerizingly miscast as a scaredy-cat farm boy who stumbles into the main action, and then has to perpetuate a supposedly-obvious lie that he is also a secret agent. I kept expecting this to go full The Tourist, his schtick is so dubious. It doesn’t help that Reese/Warnick (or possibly Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers) try to be cute and openly declare all of the subtext about their relationship in the dialogue, even calling it "subtext" because redundancy is redundant. It’s quite nauseating to sit through, given how much I love fourth-wall nudging stuff like this when it’s done well.
This is one of the most mismanaged films I have ever watched, much less reviewed at length. Pretty much everyone here, both in front of and behind the camera, is either working well outside of their means, or so badly groomed that they succumb to their worst creative traits. I truly hate making this criticism, because it’s now so overused that I actively cringe whenever I see someone else use it, but this really does feel like an AI just spat a bunch of random names and ideas out, and some poor sap of a studio decided to use all of them. It’s just soulless from end to end, and the only saving grace I can think of is that, maybe, the paycheck that everyone involved got for this will go to projects they’re actually a good fit for… but if I have to get that cynical to defend a movie, it’s officially not worth it.
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