Focus could use some.
Here’s a Will Smith and Margot Robbie con-caper flick that tries its level best to be smart and glossy and shiny and only manages two out of three. For the avoidance of doubt, as contract lawyers say, it’s not smart.
I can’t really blame the studio for making this: it’s the kind of thing that seems really great on paper. A big name star, the 2014 it girl from Wolf of Wall Street, and the celebrated director duo that helmed one of Haus’s favorite films of all time. Can’t lose, right?
You can, and they did. I’m going to break tradition here and prepare a short numbered list of this film’s failings.
(1) It’s unrealistic. I’m no pickpocket, but some of the moves Smith demonstrates to Robbie defy not just belief but basic physics. Focus also plays up the idea that cadres of tight-knit and light-fingered hoods might actually band together, keep mum, not sell each other out, and happily split their shares. I just doubt this quite a lot, and incidentally, so do the writers of just about every other crime thriller ever made. Focus seems like it was made by people who’ve never even sat next to a real thief. It’s like those annoying vintage-looking vegetable sections in big-chain grocery stores, all faux-wagons and awnings and little produce carts, trying so hard to evoke a totally bogus imagining of a past that never existed in the first place and doing it under fluorescent lights to boot. That’s what this is. A movie about a lifestyle that exists nowhere, ever. Everything is unconvincing.
(2) It’s confusing. Not really too much to say here. It drags at times, and doesn’t make a lot of sense. There are twists, of sorts, but —
(3) It’s dumb. Yes. You spend the entire time hoping for some clever payoff, but there’s none. It’s a stupid payoff. Like someone spent all weekend pulling the stuffing out of four thousand Beanie Babies and packed them with stupid instead, then backed up a beat-up old Duallie piled high with these little furry pouches of stupid and just dumped them all on your driveway. I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t that bad. I was just expecting a whole lot more clever from Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. I don’t know why I’m surprised, given that the writer of Crazy Stupid Love went on to pen The Guilt Trip and Last Vegas. Is everyone today a one-trick pony?
(4) It doesn’t have any cool takeaways. You know what I mean, every heist film needs a couple — the clever nugget of wisdom gleaned from our two-hour dance with criminal ways. We all hope to take something home for lagniappe, some truism we can parade around in our normal lives. There’s nothing here.
(5) It has a boring, lackluster title. I could have come up with a better title in one and half seconds. “Goat boner.” There. Told you.
The actors do a decent job and it’s generally pretty to look at. It’s really just a bad story.
Focus is blah.
Haus Verdict: Bright colors and nice visuals, but not a whole lot else.