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She’s now ready to be Nicky’s partner, and perhaps rival, in con. Out of her league but a quick study, Jess learns to pick the pockets of smitten strangers and earns her bona fides.
#FOCUS WILL SMITH PROFESSIONAL#
He’s on hiatus when he meets the creamy blond Jess Barrett (Robbie), who pulls a clumsy ruse that he plays along with simply from professional curiosity. Spurgeon (whose Urban Dictionary definition genteelly translates as “the man of all men”) runs a con outfit of 20 or so filchers who work casinos, racetracks, football games - any place where cocky rich guys can be separated from their loot. So Ficarra and Requa deserve some credit in letting Will be Will in the star’s first charm barrage since 2005’s Hitch. Even in the Men is Black movies, the actor’s cool was deadpan the smile had to be inferred.
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What’s odd is that in most of his movies - from the time he sauntered into action stardom with Independence Day, through a decade of dystopian sci-fi roles in I, Robot, I Am Legend, Hancock and the misfortune known as After Earth - Smith has been obliged to glower, macho-man style, as if Bruce Willis hadn’t already patented the stoic scowl.
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The blithe smile, the genial but steely authority he wears like a bespoke suit: that’s Smith since his Fresh Prince days. The con in con man is short for confidence - what he radiates, and what he extracts from his marks before fleecing them. “I can convince anyone of anything,” says Smith’s Nicky Spurgeon, and the man is not boasting.
#FOCUS WILL SMITH MOVIE#
The mix of longtime star and minx on the rise is one tasty element in the success of a movie that approaches the modest goals and effortless allure of a 60-year-old Hitchcock. Grant had just hit 50, and Kelly was 25, but their upmarket glamour and wiles made a perfect match for a movie about an aging cat burglar and the young American heiress who dares to play his game.įicarra and Requa, the authors of this script that everyone and nobody wanted to star in, finally settled on Will Smith, 46, and Margot Robbie, the 24-year-old blond Aussie who shared Leonardo DiCaprio’s bed (and a ton of cocaine) in The Wolf of Wall Street. On the other hand, Adrian Martinez's Farhad is the sort of post-Zach Galifianakis sidekick role that Galifianakis lost weight to escape.Since Focus conjures up a more relaxed time in Hollywood history, when the top stars radiated their golden appeal in romantic comedies about duplicitous souls, writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa might have dreamed of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, who paired in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 To Catch a Thief. Wong is an amusing antagonist in his lone scene, and Gerald McRaney deserves more roles like his pitbull here. The scene runs too long, raising preposterous stakes, yet Smith always lets us see him sweat, which is cooler than acting cool.įocus is dotted with good performances, even if half the characters don't ultimately matter or come into play much. Wong), using money that partly belongs to Jess. At the Superdome during the faux big game, Nicky gets drawn into risky play-by-play bets with a high roller (B.D. Lots of dazzling people, none of whom can be trusted, which gets frustrating as we wait for an end game to form.įicarra and Requa keep the cons lively, and in one instance remarkably tense. Without spoilers, Nicky and Jess' relationship spans three years and two continents, at unreasonable facsimiles of a Super Bowl and a grand prix race in Buenos Aires. Then Focus begins conning us, over and over. Jess proves her worth to Nicky and they become lovers. Nicky runs the kind of theft ring that only exists in movies: dozens of pickpockets, decoys and relays working to choreographed perfection, a larcenous flash mob lifting watches, wallets, whatever. She's Jess Barrett (Robbie), and Nicky plays along, flipping the con by exposing Jess' mistakes. Smith plays Nicky Spurgeon, minding his business in a Big Easy night club when a blond looker asks if he'll act like her boyfriend.