Focus
When the last two films you have to your name are “Men in Black 3” and “After Earth,” it’s important to reassess your choices as an actor. Yes, the former was a big hit, but a creative dud overall, but the latter was just a dud. It was time for Will Smith to go small, go character driven, and get into some riskier terrain. In the grand scheme of things, “Focus” isn’t a big risk for Smith, but it’s smaller and more focused on character and story than spectacle, which already puts it in the plus category compared to his last two films.
Smith stars as Nicky, a career con man who manages to get into a packed restaurant in New Orleans the week of the pro football championship (not the Super Bowl– no NFL copyrights are present here). This is a big week for putting the con on out-of-towners, and immediately, he has eyes on Jess (Margot Robbie), but she’s a practitioner of the trade, as well. Soon, they become a couple in more ways than one, as Nicky brings her into his world of professional con artists. Big events like this, they bring in quite a haul, and the cool, detached Nicky (whose father and grandfather were also in the trade, and legends in their own right) is a perfect ringleader. So why don’t he and Jess head out of town together after a particularly great con? That’s a question that might be better answered when they are reunited three years later, him going in on “one last job,” her as the girlfriend of a race team owner (Adrian Martinez) Nicky is brought in by to pull a big con on his competition.
“Focus” is very much a caper in the “Out of Sight”/”Ocean’s Eleven” vein, with style, clever plotting and a jazz-infused score by Nick Urata taking center stage. That’s even over the characters, who are simply just hitting marks and trying not to show their hands to each other and the audience. Overall, that style-over-substance aesthetic hurts the film in head-to-head comparisons to those aforementioned Steven Soderbergh classics, but writer/directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (whose work includes “Bad Santa,” “Crazy Stupid Love” and the criminally underrated “I Love You, Phillip Morris”) aren’t aiming for great filmmaking so much as just giving the audience a good time for a few hours. You want to watch a great movie about a con man? Watch David Mamet’s “The Spanish Prisoner.” “Focus” is slick, smartly constructed studio filmmaking in the vein of how classic Hollywood worked from the ’30s through the ’50s. It’s a type of vehicle that suits Smith well, and the on-target charm he displays here has been largely missing from his work since his 2005 film, “Hitch” (another movie that feels very much like “Old Hollywood” filmmaking, when one thinks about it)– it definitely beats the stoicism of his turns in “After Earth” and the (personally underrated) “Seven Pounds,” as well as the “paycheck performance” he gave in “MiB3.” He is matched every step of the way by Robbie, whose star is only getting bigger after her breakthrough performance in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and it’ll be great to see these two together again in the superhero villain team-up, “Suicide Squad,” come next year. I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge strong supporting work by Rodrigo Santoro as Nicky’s tech genuis, Gerald McRaney as a dangerous right-hand man to the race team owner, and BD Wong as an Asian businessman with a penchant for gambling on anything. Wong’s performance is the catalyst for the best, most suspenseful scene in the movie when Nicky is drawn into increasingly dangerous bets, much to Jess’s concern. It’s a stretch of film in which everyone is in peak form, and it’s reason enough to watch “Focus,” although unfortunately, the material on both sides of that sequence isn’t nearly as compelling. That said, as far as stepping stones to renewed stardom go, “Focus” is a very good start for Will Smith. Hopefully, the sky’s the limit from here.
