Things get better when the pair – along with a team that includes Farhad (Adrian Martinez) and Horst (Kevin Spacey lookalike Brennan Brown) – turn their sights onto more deserving marks. These aren’t the happy-go-lucky confidence men of The Sting they’re straight-up pickpockets, fraudsters, and thieves. But what I didn’t like about the early scenes of Focus, as Nicky trains Jess in the art of the con, is the types of scams they pull: snagging wallets and watches, skimming credit card information from unsuspecting Superbowl tourists in New Orleans. The stuff between Nicky and Jess works just fine, although Smith and Robbie don’t share a whole lot of chemistry. Their meet cute occurs when Jess seduces Nicky, takes him up to her hotel room, and pulls the old jealous husband gag. Smith plays Nicky Spurgeon, a Brooklyn con man whose gift of grift has been passed down through the generations Margot Robbie ( The Wolf of Wall Street) is Jess Barrett, a hot young upstart looking to get in on the game. Focus is certainly no match for the greats – which include The Sting, Paper Moon, The Grifters, House of Games – but it’s a decent-enough ride, most of the way. But I’m a sucker for con artist movies – heck, I even found a lot to like about Now You See Me – and had a lot of fun with Focus guessing the twists and turns before rolling my eyes at the revelations. This scene emblematic of Focus as a whole: detailed, complex ruses that are ultimately revealed to be completely illogical. Usually, we see it from the hero’s point of view, and don’t have time to think about the villain’s illogical thought process but that’s exactly what filmmakers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa linger on here, taking up minutes of screen time. We’ve seen things like this before: the villain comes out of nowhere to blindside and incapacitate the hero. He obviously knows exactly where they are and where they’re going, and could bring them in covertly at any point, but the near-fatal car crash tells these guys he really means business. Charged to bring in these characters alive, the henchman meticulously plans and undertakes a strategy that could have easily killed both of them and seriously injured himself, in front of dozens of witnesses who will immediately report the incident to police.
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