Focus **½ (2015, Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Rodrigo Santoro, Gerald McRaney) – Movie Review

Will Smith and Margot Robbie star together as veteran con man Nicky and Jess, the amateur con artist he takes under his wing and into his crime outfit. Though Smith is 46 and Robbie (who made such a splash in The Wolf of Wall Street) is 24, their characters become romantically and passionately involved – and seem just right together and made for each other. The two stars share enough chemistry to make Focus just about work.

Nicky lies, cheats and steals for a living, though he falls for Jess, true love isn’t for him, and at the end of a big job and pays her off, packs her off to the airport and breaks her heart.

Then, awkwardly, it turns out the film falls into two distinct halves when they split and there’s a gap of three years till they encounter again, when Jess is now the moll of  a handsome, greedy and very jealous Latino gangster (Rodrigo Santoro), who has a vicious minder in Owens (Gerald McRaney).

It’s a conman movie, so obviously things are never quite what they seem, that’s the name of Sting-style stories. The movie lacks focus unfortunately but has its good sequences, like the initial masterclass in street stealing in New Orleans and later in the stadium sting on the rich punter Liyuan (B D Wong), a sequence livened up no end by using the Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil.

And it has its good points, notably Robbie, who emerges best in another alluring performance that bodes well for things to come. The Aussie star was great in a great movie like The Wolf of Wall Street, but it’s more difficult to shine in a moderate movie like Focus, but shine she does. She makes sure that it’s hard to take your eyes off her, upstaging the star, who is unfairly sole billed above the title.

Smith is OK, appealing and charming as usual, if not terribly fired up, McRaney is menacing enough, Santoro creepy enough, Adrian Martinez (as ‘a five hundred pound Persian’ named Fatass Farhad) and Brennan Brown useful enough as Smith’s gang partners, and Robert Taylor rough enough as the Aussie crook McEwen.

If things get intentionally messy in the story, the movie itself is messy. Something’s gone a bit wrong with it. Maybe it’s the tone. It either needed to be more fun, campy, escapist and glamorous, or go the other way and be more serious, nasty and realistic. Actually what it needs is to be like The Wolf of Wall Street, more exuberant, more outrageous, more stylish, just more, more, more. It has the basic ingredients of what it needs to succeed, but success eludes it by not having a great chef like Martin Scorsese to cook the dish.

Focus is OK too, but there’s a much better movie trying to get out from under it. Conman movies aren’t rare, so they have to be dishes served red hot, and this is just moderately warm.

Writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa also made I Love You Phillip Morris (2009).

Focus was originally scheduled to star Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Kristen Stewart was cast but when Smith signed she dropped out citing the age difference but Robbie is three months younger than her.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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