It’s one thing to encounter a film with an imaginatively playful screenplay that takes occasional liberties with common sense. It’s quite another to have your intelligence insulted in a manner as blatant and as numbing as the new Will Smith movie, Focus. Just when we are asked to fall for one outrageous scenario, another one doubly nonsensical is sure to arrive. With a tone and look like a slickly designed commercial, the miracle is that Focus somehow manages to be mildly entertaining despite all its contrived jive.
Nicky (Will Smith) is a con man who goes along with being the target of an entrapment scheme perpetrated by Jess (Margot Robbie) and an accomplice–only to interrupt their gambit in mid-enactment. Smith has seen it all and done it all, so a little halted sexual encounter in order to blackmail him is small potatoes. Before you can say “coed mentor/student buddy film,” Nicky, a master con man, is giving tips to Jess on how her sting might have been successfully accomplished. She’s smitten and wants in on his game. He gives in.
Next we’re they’re off to New Orleans to rip off Super Bowl suckers ready to have their pockets picked seemingly en masse. Nicky’s ridiculously huge posses includes a very funny Adrian Martines as Farhad, who has most of the movie’s best lines. In a scene that goes on about three times as long as it should have Nicky and his Super Bowl luxury-box host each just happen to have over a million dollars in cash on them to set up the next scam. And that’s not the most credulity-bending part of the set-up. Focus has little shame in stretching our patience as thin as the mental acumen of its script. Yet somehow amidst the happy horseshit ad nauseam there are surprising moments that make the film almost agreeable–
–Almost. The film’s good moments are probably about the chemistry between Smith and Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street). Those expecting a Smith as vibrant as he was in Six Degrees of Seperation, however, will be disappointed. Nicky’s dad didn’t call him “Mellow” for nothing. It’s the kind of film where Nicky, after a several-years breakup with Jess finds himself on a new continent only to bump into her inexplicably cozying up to his very important mark in a major scam that has to do with motor racing, and, also, makes no sense. Jess’s appearance is treated as if it’s a mere common coincidence. Then in the film’s climax, a twist occurs that is so dismally outrageous it makes everything before it seem uplifting. Were Focus a spoof, it’s ending might almost fit….Co-directors and writers Glenn Ficara and John Requa made a better film in last year’s Crazy, Stupid Love, and co-wrote a far better one in Bad Santa. And if it’s a great caper film you want, check out House of Games instead of getting conned for your $12.50 by this film.