Glen Ficcara and John Requa penned Bad Santa (2003) before debuting as directors with their energetic queer-romance-cum-criminal farce I Love You, Philip Morris (2009), and scored a hit with Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011). Focus, their latest, aims to be an elegantly tricky star vehicle for weathered pro Will Smith and up-and-comer Margot Robbie, annexing a style of movie that’s often proved perfect for showcasing headliner charm, the con artist caper flick, ever since The Sting (1973). Focus also echoes back to criminal-lover comedy-thrillers of days past from Trouble in Paradise (1933) to To Catch a Thief (1955) to How to Steal a Million (1966) and on. Ficcara and Requa start well, unfolding a leisurely sequence of flirtation in an upmarket hotel, the sort of place where Nicky (Smith) permanently resides: bounteous blonde Jess (Robbie) suddenly lands at his table, seeking respite from her drunk boyfriend. Thing is, Nicky recognises this old play from the extortionist playbook, because he’s a grifter of fearsome talent and reputation, and he playfully lets the incompetent duo act out their scene before rumbling their amateur-hour theatrics. Jess approaches Nicky later and appeals to him to help her step up to the flimflammer big leagues, and, once she trails him to New Orleans where he runs a massive operation of pickpockets and con artists working the Mardi Gras crowds, he takes her under his wing. Jess rapidly evolves under his tutelage whilst romance sparks, but Nicky’s wilfully solitary existence leads him to break off with her just after a triumphal score, skipping out of a taxi as she rolls on to the rest of her life as a teary mess. Three years later fate sees them cross paths again however, and a new game entwines them as Nicky is hired by racing team boss Garriga (Rodrigo Santoro) to con a rival Australian racer, McEwen (Robert Taylor), in competing for ownership of a new design: Jess appears, now a fully formed glamour queen, amidst the plush excitement of race season parties. Except that, yes, not all is as it seems.
Ficcara and Requa certainly glaze this fantasia in the loveliest of wrappings, via Xavier Grobet’s cinematography, providing images of crystalline sharpness infused with chic allure. Early sequences evoke Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (1998) as Focus delights in depicting sexual gamesmanship spiced with transgressive allure (and indeed, with all the pseudo-jazzy music and retro charm in celebrating cute criminals, the film owes a lot to Soderbergh’s Oceansfilms as well), and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), as it nails down the the simultaneously romantic and alienating feeling of a rootless life spent in classy hotels, like a glossy magazine ad sifted through shots that recall Edward Hopper’s Automat and Chop Suey joint, before a shift to the European scene proves a ripe environment to shoot the actors in places of romantic bustle that call to mind ‘50s jet-set dramas. Robbie’s vivid, old-fashioned movie star looks seem utterly at home behind sunglasses with kerchief over her hair a la Grace Kelly in some never-made Billy Wilder Euro-swank flick, or stalking poolside in bikini and stilettos, an acetylene torch of VIP sexuality. Smith has often mistaken assuming a glum attitude, compared to his ebulliently confident early persona, for maturation, and there’s some of that here. But Focus thankfully lets his recent ill-advised attempts to make himself paterfamilias of the showbiz family Robinson fall by the wayside and play a rakishly professional criminal armed with a glib tongue and a surplus of cool, albeit with some angst lurking deep beneath his surface composure.
Nicky’s mentorship of Jess takes her through the looking glass into a world of cheats and thieves that seems nonetheless cosy, and gives her – and the audience – the vicarious thrill of looking down the nose at the suckers of the world, couched mostly in sexual terms. Nicky explicitly defines the cultural anxiety people of their breed prey on, of guys with infidelity on their minds and money to spend. But of course, Nicky’s foreboding facet proves to be his moral side fighting its way out. Focus inevitably puts him and Jess through the wringer for their lifestyle, but it never exactly forces them repudiate it either. The film’s central set-piece sees Nicky take Jess to a football game in the Superdome, ensconced in a private box with the superrich, and getting into a game of one-upmanship making pointless bets over the game’s progressive turns with tycoon Liyuan (B.D. Wong), a famously enthusiastic gambler. Hints have been dropped that Nicky has a history of problem gambling, Jess is increasingly anxious, and the scene builds as a mesh of images and audio cues whilst keeping the exact nature of what we’re watching – is it another inspired sting or a harsh revelation of Nicky’s self-destructive side? – hidden until the end. Wong’s performance adds to the fun. Sadly, however, Focus starts to go off the rails after this sequence, as the interesting depiction of Nicky as a man willing to lay waste to his personal relationships for the sake of maintain his shark-like existence must give way to yearning and a weakly developed metaphor for the problems of relationship trust.
It also seems compulsory today that all films depicting con artists be structured like a con game, where the audience will eventually be blindsided by the ingenious method of the unfolding story. Here, the key moment of big revelation, in which Nicky explains his ingenious method proves, in a waggish touch from a couple of very knowing director-screenwriters, to be a total crock. But the film doesn’t provide anything of real urgency or effective pizazz to make up for it, and Focus like a lot of modern films mistakes plot for story, too obsessed with its own sleight of hand when it should have settled for charting the blend of love and distrust that defines Nicky and Jess’s relationship. The attentiveness to building a mood at once romantic and sly that defines the film’s early scenes, worked with a slightly oblique sense of humour, falls victim to clichéd expectations and a narrative that pushes well past believability, whilst Ficcara and Requa fill in quite a bit of running time with musical montages. That plot is a big problem too, neither basic enough to create clear ground for Smith and Robbie to spar and dally, nor actually complicated and devious enough to enjoy as a display of genre mechanics. The finale is oddly static and the resolution proper, although Ficcara and Requa lay groundwork for it all through the movie, is still clumsy and anti-climactic. Focus is a missed opportunity to make a modern classic of breezy, happily unethical star-gazing. Ultimately it’s like a cocktail with all the right ingredients but the bartender forgot to shake to achieve the proper taste and texture. Adrian Martinez offers naughty flippancy as Nicky’s occasional partner-in-crime and official comic relief chunky guy; Gerald McRaney evokes his Major Dad days as Garriga’s hard-ass majordomo with a secret.
