Cinemazlowski 'Focus' gets it right

Feb 27, 2015

There are few greater pleasures in cinema than enjoying a well-crafted con-man thriller that respects your intelligence, features stars with sizzling charisma and chemistry, and dialogue that's witty at every turn. Very few have pulled it off since the heyday of Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant's team-ups in films like “To Catch A Thief” and “North By Northwest,” but the new Will Smith movie “Focus” - out today – is one of the rare ones to get it right.

Since this is a Catholic site and it's my primary duty to alert people to the moral and ethical problems in a film, I want to make a couple of points right away. “Focus” is a movie that features massive amounts of pickpocketing, thievery, fencing of those goods that have been pickpocketed and stolen, and then on top of that there are epic feats of gambling, duplicity, backstabbing and deception.

But in the context of a con-man movie, in which the audience is called upon to root for the antihero to find a way to win against ever-escalating odds, all of these illicit activities are presented in tremendously fun way, and are so complex that there is no way anyone seeing the movie could possibly walk out the door and emulate it – so they can't even really be an occasion of sin, unlike truly violent movies that can set off one's mindset to anger, or a highly sexual film inspiring illicit desires.

There is only one surprise shooting, a couple of sex scenes cut away at foreplay or are implied via discreet morning-after shots, and for an R-rated movie involving criminals, the foul language is pretty limited, with perhaps 50 or so offensive words – from five or six improper uses of Jesus' name to about 20 uses of the F word, and the rest composed of minor profanities - in the full two hours. And most foul the language comes in bursts in contained, heated moments. I'm not justifying these things, but proportional to the majority of modern thrillers, these amounts of sex and foul language are minimal and will barely register with anyone who's inclined to enjoy this genre of film.

Now for those adults who can just sit back and enjoy themselves with an always fun and sometimes brilliant script, “Focus” is the story of a lifelong con man named Nicky Spurgeon, played by Smith with the unique mix of charisma, humor, romance and emotional depth that marks his best work – and which here makes for one of his best roles. At the movie's outset, Nicky is enjoying a drink at a ritzy hotel bar by himself, when he notices an attractive young blonde woman named Jess (Margot Robbie, building on her “Wolf of Wall Street” breakthrough to once again show major talent) tricking a variety of men out of both their drinks and their watches and wallets.

When she tries to trick him into taking her upstairs to her room and appears to seduce him, another man bursts in with a gun, claims to be her boyfriend, and threatens to kill them. It turns out to be a scam, but Nicky figures it out immediately and reveals that he knew he was being scammed all along.

The next day, Nicky follows Jess out of the hotel and taunts her about her poor crime skills. She begs him to teach her how to up her game on that front, and the two start to hang out as he shows her in an incredible series of moves how he can take items off of people from virtually their heads to their toes (it's a clean scene, I swear). As she slowly impresses him with her ability to learn his illicit trade, he brings her into his organization: a group of about 30 people who can conduct scams, robberies and mass non-violent criminal actions on a basis ranging from a couple members to the entire group robbing dozens of passersby at once on a busy pedestrian street.

They next move to taking on the Super Bowl in New Orleans, scamming and robbing countless men who are away for the weekend from their wives (mostly robbing while flirting over drinks, with only one quick and clothed fake seduction shown). But once Nick takes Jess to a primo box seating area to watch the game, an Asian businessman overhears them betting each other over which people in the crowd would exhibit which behavior, and a string of utterly insane bets between Nick and the businessman ensues.

This sequence between Nick and the businessman is one of the best-written, most unexpected and edge of your seat mind games I have ever seen in watching thousands of films. The sequence on its own would be worth the price of admission even at today's high ticket prices, and is a masterwork on every level by writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa – whose vastly different last film, “Crazy Stupid Love” was one of the absolute best films of 2011 and is highly recommended for older teens and adult viewing.

From there, the movie leaps three years forward to Buenos Aires, Argentina, with Nicky hired by a world-class race-car owner to figure out how to trick his main competitor into buying a bogus device that gives fake readings of fuel efficiency to the cars that use it, in the hopes that such a deal will give him the advantage to dominate the racing world. Nicky is all set with a fresh con to set the deal up – but then sees Jess arrive at a party, only to discover that she's now the girlfriend of the man who's hired him for this gig.

Since they had parted ways under abrupt circumstances, her re-entry into his life throws him for a loop at what appears to be just the wrong time.

It may sound like I've given away all the plot, but rest assured, even this is only about half of it. The rest remains so unpredictable, fast-paced and fun that this is easily a movie that any adult should enjoy – as I reiterate that the above-mentioned immoral content is handled with as much discretion as an R-rated comic thriller will allow. As such, I highly recommend this as the movie to focus on this weekend.