Focus

Someone decided to put a heaping helping of romantic comedy in my heist movie, and it does not taste good.

Will Smith stars as Nicky - the hardened, distant con man from a legendary family of scam artists. Because the script calls for it, he has taken a shine to the sexy blonde pickpocket, Jess (Margot Robbie), even though she isn't all that great at it. She has the spunk and drive, but Jess doesn’t appear to have the skills to run with this crowd.

Yet, Nick allows her to join forces with his gang of 30 knocking over unsuspecting tourists and football fans in New Orleans for the big game (they can't call it the Super Bowl or the NFL will get all litigious and stuff, as if their lawyers don’t have bigger problems to deal with).

The week of plundering ends on a strange note, and Nicky and Jess don't see each other for three years.

Just when Nicky is about to pull a con to sabotage a Grand Prix race for the mega rich Garriga (Rodrigo Santoro), it turns out that Jess is dating Nicky’s employer. Can Nicky focus on the job at hand, or does he have unresolved feelings for Jess?

It’s like Focus is two half-baked movies smushed together to make one.

Because of this awkward grafting together of the two parts, we end up with a set up that is much too long. It’s fun to see them pulling all sorts of scams, but it takes far too long to get to the plot.

I guess writers/directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa think the love story is the plot driving the movie, but the heist portion is what is most interesting, and it’s pushed to the back burner too often.

Then, the second half of Focus has all sorts of tone issues. Requa and Ficarra present a movie that is part comedy, part romance and part heist, but it adds up to all boring and uneventful. It’s a Frankenstein’s Monster of a movie pieced together to give each possible audience member something to enjoy, but the finished, combined project is distasteful.

They desperately want Focus to have the cool, hip vibe of a movie like Ocean’s 11 or Out Of Sight, but the mixed tones destroy any chance of that happening. It leaves us with a movie that is much more lame than cool.

Worst of all, Ficarra and Requa drop the final act in our laps with a thud. It’s not as shocking, nor as funny, as they might have dreamed it would be.

Smith and Robbie are trying their best to save bad material, and Gerald McRaney is given plenty of non-Major Dad dialogue to make him sound tough (but he sounds silly). However, none of them are given moments to turn on the charm and wow us. Instead, everyone sounds drowsy.

Focus is rated R for language, some sexual content and brief violence.