Romantic action-comedy has always had a breathless, eager-to-please, overloaded quality to it. You could say it’s an unpopular genre. We laugh! With racing impulses! And faint before the lunar chemistry! In a superior romantic comedy, like “Romancing the Stone” or “Out of Sight” or “True Lies” or the new sequel to “Murder Mystery”, the action East romance – it’s how the characters connect. (One of the ways the form extends to vintage Hollywood is that it’s usually couples who dislike each other so much that it’s only by joining in death-defying scrapes that they can melt ice.) But there are also movies like “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” where love is sandwiched between vehicular mayhem so aggressive it’s played for “laughs,” and too much of it all becomes like one of those fast food fusion experiences Sorry but the cinematic escapist equivalent of a burger topped with a quesadilla served with cheese fries isn’t my idea of ​​a good time.

And that’s what”Ghostis. Directed by incredibly unsubtle Dexter Fletcher (“Rocketman”), from a what-you-can-throw-in script by four screenwriters (Rhett Reese, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Paul Wernick ) that makes you grateful there weren’t four more, the film is a romantic action-comedy that starts out light and breezy but turns, before you know it, into a show of deadweight miserable excesses.

We’re talking about a setup that’s too wacky to hang on. Fight scenes from a Jason Statham movie but staged with far less precision. An arbitrary series of international parameters. A spy-thriller plot that’s just convoluted but inconsequential enough to be thoroughly boring. And a romantic connection between the two stars that doesn’t grow and develop so much that it metastasizes and gets trampled on, though theoretically we’re supposed to look at their machinations and think: thriller this exhausting together stays together.

“Ghosted” begins in Washington, D.C., as a seductive slime confection, with Chris Evansall sexy beard and menschy smile, and Ana de Armas, while flirting, arguing when they meet cute. It’s Cole, a farmer who runs a potted plant stand at the farmer’s market; it’s Sadie, an art curator who buys the wrong plant. But their feud turns into an afternoon coffee, then a visit to the “Exorcist” stairs in Georgetown and a live-band karaoke bar, then an all-night walk around town, followed by a jump into the bag that seals the deal. Characters connect; actors connect. The only conflict hinted at comes in the form of a running joke about a potted cactus, which symbolizes two things: the tendency of one part (it) to neglect what it is meant to nurture (which is why the cactus is the perfect plant for her), and another’s (him) tendency to be too needy, which means he could use a little of that spice. So far, so fun.

The title seems to tell us that someone is going to be ghosted – but it’s actually a reference to Cole’s paranoia about be ghost, leading to him frantically texting Sadie the next day. (He doesn’t think he’s texting her too much, because he doesn’t count emoji texting.) Cole lives with his family on a cute farm outside of Washington, where his folksy parents (Tate Donovan and Amy Sedaris ) are more favorable. of him than is his brassy sister (Lizze Broadway). But they can all agree on this: calm down! Don’t act so needy!

Cole, however, can’t help himself. It’s in his nature to be that outdated thing, the overly super nice guy. So after Sadie doesn’t return her texts, and he finds out, tracking the asthma inhaler he left in his purse (this is the first time our panic button plausibility is triggered; it will not be the last), that she has gone to London, he makes an impulsive decision. He will fly across the ocean and surprise her! Like it’s the climax of a ’90s rom-com and not the kickoff of an all-but-the-kitchen-sink streaming movie.

Will Cole look like a stalker? Of course he will! No sane person would do that. But the movie needs him to be in London so he can suddenly be surrounded by three henchmen who mistake him for… the taxman. It’s the codename for a mysterious spy specter that he really isn’t. (It’s also an excuse to use the Beatles’ “Taxman.”) So why would they think it’s him? Why would a sinister villain (Tim Blake Nelson) with a Cold War Dracula accent tie him to a chair and start torturing him with an assortment of live insects? If you haven’t already figured it out, the theme of “Ghosted” – or at least its modus operandi – is, Why ask why?

A good rom-com should ramp up, slowly but surely, so that the audience feels like they’ve been invited on the ride. “Ghosted,” on the other hand, wastes no time dropping Cole and Sadie off in a desert in Pakistan, where they command a colorful native bus and engage in a chase down the cliffside road that seems to want to be the centerpiece of the “Indiana Jones XIV” sequence. That Cole, an innocent farmer, is already hanging off the side of the bus like a demigod of action is less nagging than the central confusion built into the story. Sadie, in case I forgot to mention it, is a CIA assassin who didn’t expect Cole to follow her to London. Yet she never looks the least bit fazed that he showed up. Even when they become partners, the two maintain their hostility, which is partly rooted in his “man over mission” philosophy. (She values ​​the mission more than the life of any coworker. Including Cole.)

Yet, for two hours of slowness, the mission was mocked. Yep, that’s a whole MacGuffin (or there are three of them), starting with Aztec, a biomedical weapon that Saturnian villain Leveque (Adrien Brody) is trying to get his hands on. Yet the film barely musters the pretense that it all matters. Evans, Marvel hero that he is, is cunning enough to flirt with nerdism, but he spends too much time playing “Ghosted”, perhaps because he has to react to too many lines like “You thought I met a hottie. Not a Mata Hari! And de Armas, I’m afraid, turns into Mata Glare-y.

In a running gag, famous actors continue to show up, unbilled, as assassins, only to be murdered after two minutes of screen time. In another running gag, everyone keeps telling Cole and Sadie, “You should get a room,” the joke being that they fight like cats and dogs. We understood: They express their sexual chemistry. There’s an action scene set aboard a plane to Jet’s triumphantly loud “Are You Gonna Be My Girl,” which leads to the two stranded on an island in the Arabian Sea. . At this point, you might start to notice that the movie isn’t building their chemistry — it’s getting in the way of it.

“Ghosted” works up to an elaborate sequence, set in a glass-encased skyscraper restaurant, which may remind you of many other, better sequences. The spy plot is by heart; the action is more explosive than any rom-act-com can really sustain. I don’t know if Dexter Fletcher has the guts to pull off an elegantly whimsical yet plausible action scene. Yet in “Ghosted” he throws a lot of stuff into the mixer, and that’s supposed to be enough. The action in this movie doesn’t do much to bring the two characters together except to the extent that when it’s over, it’s like Novocaine fades away.