Focus

Director: Glenn Ficarra & John Requa
Screenplay: Glenn Ficarra & John Requa
Stars: Will Smith (Nicky), Margot Robbie (Jess), Adrian Martinez (Farhad), Gerald McRaney (Owens), Rodrigo Santoro (Garriga), BD Wong (Liyuan), Brennan Brown (Horst), Robert Taylor (McEwen), Dotan Bonen (Gordon), Griff Furst (Gareth), Stephanie Honoré (Janice), David Stanford (Drunken Stranger), Dominic Fumusa (Jared)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2015
Country: U.S.
Focus
FocusWith the exception of a few cameo roles, Will Smith has been missing from the big screen since the critical and commercial failure of his big-budget sci-fi flop After Earth (2013). If only for that reason alone, Focus, in which he plays Nicky Spurgeon, a smooth-operating veteran con artist and master thief, has a certain built-in curiosity factor: What about this role brought him back to the silver screen after a nearly two-year absence?

As it turns out, the answer is something less than obvious, as Focus, while being generally entertaining, is a largely familiar and overly glossy run through cinematic con artist conventions. The crux of the film is the push-and-pull of Nicky’s morality and whether anything he does can be trusted. For the first half of the film, which is also the weakest, he is a decidedly amoral opportunist who is more than happy to run a massive criminal enterprise in which two dozen con artists, thieves, and pickpockets pool their resources to rip off as many people as possible during Mardi Gras week in New Orleans. Nicky sees himself as a kind of businessman—“We deal in volume,” he says at one point—and he runs his operation with a cool, corporate efficiency that helps take the spotlight off the fact that he and his team prey almost exclusively on ordinary people just trying to live their lives (as opposed to, say, the Oceans films, in which the team of canny criminals set their sights on an even bigger criminal). There is something more honest about Nicky’s strategy and he offers no apologies, but it is also makes him more disconcerting as a character, which makes it all the more obvious that the film will eventually head in a redemptive direction and allow him to become—at last—a “good guy.”

Early in the film Nicky becomes involved with Jess (Margot Robbie, hot off The Wolf of Wall Street), a beautiful and aspiring grifter who tries to rip Nicky off but ends up begging to become his protégé. Nicky takes her under his wing and shows her the ropes, and eventually romantic heat develops between them, although it is so pro-forma that it doesn’t register as much more than a mild sizzle. Being both beautiful people, it only makes sense that they would wind up in bed together after picking each other’s pockets (in an unearned allusion to the great Ernest Lubitsch’s 1932 screwball gem Trouble in Paradise). But, outside of their shared good looks, Smith and Robbie have minimal chemistry, which makes their affair feel like more of a check box dutifully filled than an organic development between two people. Thus, when they go their separate ways halfway through the film, it doesn’t have the dramatic sting it’s clearly intended to carry.

Thankfully, the second half of the film works much better, with a surprisingly effective transitional scene in which Nicky gets deeper and deeper into a series of increasingly absurd and expensive bets with an eccentric Japanese businessman (BD Wong). The scene is expertly constructed and leads you so far in one direction by playing on our assumptions that the film will continue its formulaic course, that when something completely different is revealed, it is a genuine revelation. The effectiveness of that scene helps wipe away some of the bad aftertaste of the film’s opening act and preps us for the second half, which takes place three years later and finds Nicky in Buenos Aires working for Farhad (Adrian Martinez), the flamboyant owner of a Formula One race team who wants to trick his rivals into thinking they have stolen valuable technology from him. The con is complicated by both the suspicions of Farhad’s righthand man and bodyguard (Gerald McRaney) and the reappearance of Jess on Farhad’s arm, who Nicky now regrets having given up.

No one will be surprised to know that Focus eventually reveals that there are cons within cons within cons, like a stack of Russian nesting dolls, and I would be lying if I said that there wasn’t some electricity in the multiple surprises. Co-screenwriters and co-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (Crazy, Stupid, Love., I Love You Phillip Morris), who are working outside their comfort realm of comedy for the first time, have clearly done their homework and have constructed a series of elaborate ruses that few if any will fully predict. The narrative mechanics of Focus are strong, but the problem is that there isn’t much beneath that surface. Unlike the playwright and filmmaker David Mamet, who used con artistry as a dramatic means of exploring his characters’ obsessions and flaws, Ficarra and Requa don’t seem interested in punching through any surfaces, especially when the surfaces are as glitz, shiny, and glamorous as they are here. There are some nods toward Nicky have father issues, but any sense of psychological nuance is ultimately unmasked as simply another piece needed for the film’s multi-layered grift. Smith may have seen something interesting in Nicky, but it’s difficult to think that he took the role for any reason beyond the opportunity it afforded him to look really good.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (2.5)




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