I love a good con movie. The Grifters is an all time favorite. I’m a fan of House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, The Sting, Catch Me if You Can. Seriously, I can’t get enough of them.
Here’s one key to a good con film: Even though we know the con is coming, the film should still have the capacity to surprise us. In other words, we may see the double-cross coming, but the triple-cross totally throws us for a loop. Focus does this reasonably well.
Another key: the cons should actually be good—ingenious, clever, beyond our own quotidian imaginations. And that’s something Focus doesn’t do so well.
The truth is, Will Smith’s Nicky, aka “Mellow,” is barely a conman at all. He’s more like a glorified sleight-of-hand artist, with a whole lot of charisma.
My first sense that I wasn’t going to be seeing any ingenious grifts came right away. Nicky calls a trendy hotel restaurant trying to get a reservation. They tell him they’re booked. Next shot: Nicky sitting alone at a nice table. So how’d he do it? Did he switch reservation books? Blackmail someone into giving him their table? Tap into the restaurant’s mainframe? Nope, he pretended to be a famous chef. I wouldn’t exactly describe that as diabolically clever.
It’s at the restaurant where Nicky meets the blonde, leggy Jess (Margot Robbie), whom he rescues from a lecherous type at the bar. They chat, flirt, go up to her room (she’s staying at the hotel), and start getting busy, until her angry “husband” barges in. He points a gun at Nicky, who seems curiously unmoved—amused, even. Jess knows why. “He’s made us,” she sighs—at which point, Nicky goes into an elaborate explanation of all the ways their con was unconvincing. (For one, you should always wait until the mark drops trou.)
Now Jess, who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks (“my career options were criminal or hooker”), wants Nicky to teach her the ropes. After much nagging, he agrees and we get several long sequences on. . . the art of being a pickpocket. Yeah, like I said, Nicky is more thief than conman, and he introduces Jess to his surprisingly large band of merry criminals, including Adrian Martinez playing the Iranian (?) wheel-man Farhad and Brennan Brown as the droll Horst. With a group like this, you feel like they should be pulling off bank heists or museums jobs, but no, it’s mostly street gets. Their basic game is: Create a distraction (a faked heart attack, a fight) and then steal watches, wallets, jewelry, etc. when the victim has lost—you guessed it— focus.
Nicky also advises Jess to wear tight dresses and heels as a distraction, which brings me to my next problem with the film—its rather regressive sexual politics.
“Did you hit that?” Farhad asks Nicky, while Jess listens from the backseat. “I’m right here!” Jess says, a joke so “funny” it’s used in the trailer. (Ah, winking sexism, my favorite kind!). Nicky says no, but eventually, of course, he and Jess do start hooking up—and by the film’s retro code, it’s fine for Jess to be sexy and sexual for him, but not for another man. “Cover up,” Nicky advises Jess later in the film, after he sees her in a bikini, poolside with a Formula One racer named Garriga (Rodrigo Santoro). (The irony is that, before Nicky told Jess to cover up, he was having a lively conversation with another man about the size and shape of her breasts.) By now, three years have passed since Jess and Nicky have seen each other, but the film goes through great pains to make it clear that Jess never betrayed Nicky with Garriga. It’s part of the film’s fantasy that she preserves herself for him. In a word: ick.
I’d be lying if I said that Focus was completely without its charms. Smith does his patented “make being a movie star look easy” thing and he and Robbie have a nice, zippy chemistry. The film, which swings between cosmopolitan locales—New Orleans to Buenos Aires—is shot handsomely. Also, as I mentioned, it gets the who-can-you-trust rhythms of a con film right, if not the cons themselves. (The film’s best “con”, which takes place at the Super Bowl, is really more of a David Blaine style magic trick.) And the script is often as uninspired and clunky as the cons. “There are two kinds of people: hammers and nails,” Nicky tells Jess. “You decide which one you want to be.” How original! Nicky’s nickname is Mellow—”short for Marshmallow,” he explains. Wait . . .what?
Clearly, directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa have modeled their style after Steven Soderberg, who made the wonderful Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven. Not so fast, guys. Focus doesn’t earn its spot among the pantheon of great grifter films. However, if you don’t focus too hard you can almost be conned into thinking it’s sort of good.