Movie review: ‘Focus’

The story is ludicrous, even by the standards of light-hearted caper movies whose only goal is to show off beautiful people, exotic locations, and enough wealth to make Warren Buffett jealous. The plot holes make the Grand Canyon look like a drainage ditch. And the whole thing evaporates from memory in the hard light of day.

Yet Focus, Will Smith’s mea culpa to moviegoers after the post-apocalyptic tedium of After Earth two years ago, is more breezily enjoyable than it has a right to be, thanks to the chemistry between Smith and co-star Margot Robbie and a few scene-stealing performances from the rest of the cast.

Smith is Nicky, a con man who can talk the skin off a snake, and Robbie is Jess, the ambitious grifter-in-training whom Nicky is testing to see if she has the skills to join his crew. They’re in New Orleans for a big pro football game, prime time for every predator on the planet. (The filmmakers reportedly didn’t have the rights from the NFL to call it a Super Bowl, but that’s what it’s supposed to be.) With the amount of money — and drunkards — flooding into the city, Jess has little trouble lifting wallets and pilfering purses to show her worth to Nicky and the gang. She has the ability to “focus,” a key quality for this line of work, according to Nicky.

But they could be being played themselves, as Liyuan (B.D. Wong), a dangerously wealthy businessman or crime lord (it’s never made clear on which side of the law he sleeps) ends up in a gambling war of wills with Nicky. Wong, better known for his more serious roles in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The Normal Heart and Oz, plays his part with just the right amount of understated comic menace.

Of course, through all of this, Nicky and Jess start to fall for each other.

Then Focus flashes forward three years and moves to Argentina, because that’s where the requisite amount of beautiful people for a movie like this are going to be gathered all in one place. Nicky, whose fame is international, has been hired by suave race car driver Garriga (Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro), to undermine his competitors, especially Aussie McEwen (Robert Taylor, Longmire).

Unknown to Nicky, Jess is there too, for her own reasons. What follow are a lot of mistaken motives and double crossing, but none of it really matters, because the mechanics of the story are meaningless. What matters is the interplay among the actors; this is especially true for Adrian Martinez, who is hilarious as Nicky’s closest brother-in-criminal-arms Farhad, and Gerald McRaney — equally engaging as Owens, Garriga’s tough-talking right-hand man.

It’s good to see Smith look like he’s at least trying to having fun in a movie again, while Robbie, so good in The Wolf of Wall Street, more than holds her own. And, as civic product placement, Buenos Aires probably has never looked better in a Hollywood film.

No doubt, directors/writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa — who directed the darker, less disposable, Texas-set con-job movie I Love You, Phillip Morris and wrote Bad Santa — may be slumming and pulling a con of their own on moviegoers. Make no mistake, Focus is not a particularly good movie, especially in light of the talents involved. As far as con-job movies go, it falls way down on the list.

But, considering how awful so many of the thrillers that have landed in theaters this year have been, Focus isn’t such a bad way to get ripped off.

Cary Darling, 817 390-7571

Twitter: @carydar

This story was originally published February 26, 2015 at 10:00 AM with the headline "Movie review: ‘Focus’."