Focus ***

The trick to writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s new ‘rom-con’ flick Focus is to keep things going at rapid speed and make everything look super glossy, so as to fool the rest of us into thinking this qualifies as another Ocean’s Eleven. Sure, this 100 million dollar film looks the pretty picture and puts pickpocketing in a glamorous, 5-star lifestyle – no Fagins here, but Focus has us wandering off sometimes on the peripherals, and less than convinced at others, even if it is stylish to look at.

Will Smith plays successful, wealthy con artist Nicky who spots wannabe trickster Jess (The Wolf on Wall Street’s Margot Robbie) a mile off when he’s tagged as the mark. After being rumbled, she pleads with him to teach her the high-roller ways that bring the big bucks. Nicky employs her as his sultry new intern in his multi-million dollar racket. Feelings develop between the pair. Fast forward three years, and Nicky’s latest con is helping crooked Formula 1 boss Garriga (Rodrigo Santoro) get ahead of his rivals on the circuit. Only Jess makes an unlikely appearance and unsettles things.

With all the turkeys Smith has cooked in recent years, Focus is a more solid comeback for the actor into ‘grown-up’ cinema. It also makes him look very good – physically, and gives him the opportunity to get entangled with one of Hollywood’s hottest screen babes, Robbie [you can see how rumours of a real-life liaison between the actors have arisen].

Smith and Robbie on a purely physical level are good together. The problem is there is a lot of physicality in the first half that it’s like watching two lustful, slurpy teenagers in public at it all the time. It certainly gives Fifty Shades a run for its money. Things just become a little ‘ho-hum’. The colourfully stylish surroundings do their best to keep us ‘entertained’ and engaged, visually. The dialogue is unnecessarily quick that it becomes a background mumble in some cases.

Smith’s wit only seeps through occasionally that you yearn for the odd wisecrack or three, if only to recognise the actor as himself. It’s Robbie that comes off the best, combining seduction and charm with leading-girl confidence.

It’s only after Nicky and Jess finally meet again in the second half that the story gets really interesting – bar one neatly-shot scene in the first half that shows sports fans in New Orleans being fleeced of their valuables with frightening speed. The irony of all of this is pickpockets tend to blend in; Robbie as blonde bombshell Jess sticks way out.

The second half keeps you interested, purely as you want to see where it goes with the Formula 1 con angle, and Ficarra and Requa do not disappoint keeping things edgy – and yet more exotic surroundings, outfits, cars and tanned flesh. It’s like an advert for luxury goods straight out of a Mile High magazine. Santoro gives a convincing turn as the unhinged Garriga too. After all the high-life fizz on show, it’s the very end that leaves things a little flat and might have some of you wanting to see alternatives shot and disguarded on the cutting room floor, especially after a tense standoff between the tricksters and an irritate Garriga.

As heist flicks go, Focus is a lavishly shot example with an attractive cast to boot, but not as stylishly planned out at Ocean’s. Whether it satisfies the basics of such a crime genre is down to how taxing a watch you want – it certainly suffices as a reasonable date movie.

By @FilmGazer