April 23, 2023
While recovering from the death of a co-worker, art curator Sadie Rhodes (Ana de Armas) took a long drive into the countryside. Upon stopping over at a farmer's market, she met a farmer Cole Turner (Chris Evans) who was tending to his friend's house plant stall. The two did not hit it off too well at first, but his friend convinced Cole to ask for Sadie's number. This led to a spontaneous date which led to a romp in the sack.
The next few days, Cole impatiently waited for Sadie to answer his multiple text messages to her phone, but received nothing. He suddenly remembered that he had left an item with a tracking device in Sadie's purse which placed the lost item in London, England, However, upon reaching the location indicated, instead of finding Sadie, Cole was swept up in an unexpected adventure to another part of the globe.
The screen partnership of Chris Evans and Ana de Armas, two of Hollywood's most good-looking A-list stars, made this a hotly-anticipated film. However, when it first came out, critics unanimously gave it very bad reviews. It made me lower my expectations, for sure, but I really had to watch it to judge it for myself. Sure enough, I actually found it quite engaging and entertaining, definitely not as bad as those critics said it was.
Sure, it had familiar elements of "True Lies" (1994) or "Knight and Day" (2010). However, unlike those two, here the tables were turned and it was the male partner who was unwittingly thrown into a deadly situation involving spies. That male partner being Chris Evans (who can't really shake his perfect Captain America persona even if he wanted to) made his awkward klutzy scenes all the more humorous, and quite fun to watch.
Ana de Armas had already proven before that she can be an action star with her roles in "No Time to Die" (2021) and "The Gray Man" (2022). Here, she had fistfights and gunfights galore, raced up the "Exorcist" (1970) stairs, and even drove an old festively-decorated Pakistani bus on reverse through the Khyber Pass while being chased and shot at by bad guys. She is as bad-ass as she is sexy, the perfect female action star for this generation.
Evans and De Armas looked good together, either in their romantic scenes as well as their action-comedy scenes, so I do not see a problem with their chemistry. Admittedly, there were repetitive lines about their sexual tension, or that they should "get a room," but I still found them quite amusing. Adrien Brody played antagonist Leveque a bit too cartoonishly. The guest star cameos (4 of them!) were quite delightful surprises. 6/10.
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