In caper thrillers, you trust no one. There are con men and con women. Occasionally, there are condoms. A con man doesn’t admit a con woman into his business just because she has a knack. There’s always another reason. We the audience are primed for it. We don’t get comfortable. We don’t want to take anything for granted. We are waiting for the sucker punch, the switch, the betrayal.
About halfway through Focus, a con-com starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie, written and directed by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, the two fellows who made Crazy Stupid Love, the girl gets dumped, left in the back seat of a cab with $80,000, not bad for a First Act’s work. ‘I’m sorry,’ says the dumper, Nicky Spurgeon (Smith), ‘I can’t do this.’ We are not exactly sure what this is. Maybe pay a cab driver when he has a perfectly decent car driven by one of the crew right behind him. Maybe put a girl, Jess (Robbie) he has feelings for in jeopardy when he looks like he’s being taken, when he goes to a big football game with a girl who doesn’t like the sport – that’s surely not a first – and they get to play another sort of game, a game that someone else in the box wants in on. A game where our so-called hero – there’s nothing heroic about stealing watches and wallets from unsuspecting tourists – cannot call anything right.
Does Smith have a poker face? Watch the movie to find out. He certainly has toned physique. He keeps in shape. The camera lingers on his curves in a bedroom scene, his mown lawn of chest hair. If you dig that – and who would dig up a lawn – then you might take something akin to pleasure from the movie, which is constructed with that shared knowledge of caper movies.
In the closing credits, those who actually stay for them – not a given – will hear a version of ‘Windmills On Your Mind’ familiar from The Thomas Crown Affair. It’s a reminder of the familiar role of a woman in a caper movie, to change or redeem the criminal hero. She knows what he’s like – he advertises it. Her job is to say, whatever thrill you get from robberies, you will get more satisfaction from me.
The hero naturally wants both.
In many ways, Fifty Shades of Grey is reminiscent of the classic con movie. There is a hero addicted to deviant behaviour and a woman who challenges him. There are also the glamorous locations, helicopter flights, glider flights, hotels and vintage wine. Fifty Shades is also a con because it is an incomplete movie. Who is the woman who enslaved Christian Grey and is it a great role for Glenn Close? But both it and Focus aim squarely at the female audience. Focus gives them potential honeymoon destinations of New Orleans and Buenos Aires, locations that underscore the direction the film goes in – south.
The script by the two directors, who gave us the memorable line, ‘you’re better than the gap’ (Ryan Gosling to Steve Carell) is a broken-backed affair that struggles with a through-line. Early on, we see Nicky brooding. He goes to an expensive restaurant and dines alone. Why so conspicuous, especially if you’re a career criminal? Alone means trouble! Jess treats him as a mark. She is being harassed by another man and comes to him for respite. ‘Are you a serial killer?’ she asks. ‘How many people do you have to kill to be a serial killer?’ ‘Five.’ Pause. ‘Well, I’m not a serial killer,’ he laughs.
This is what they call badinage, the foreplay.
Nicky ends up in the bedroom of the distressed young Jess. Then her significant thug other turns up and puts a gun to his head. The conman is unimpressed. ‘You did it all wrong. You’re supposed to get my pants off first.’ I didn’t understand this either, but apparently guys in the act of seducing other guy’s wives end up leaving their trousers behind as they run out the door, leaving their wallet behind. Wouldn’t that be in their jacket pocket instead? Hardly the point!
The two directors show this later on and we collectively slap our palms against our foreheads (though I’d rather use someone else’s forehead because it hurts less). I couldn’t help feeling that this was designed as a star vehicle for Gosling only he decided to direct his own movie, Lost River, instead and we all know how that turned out (i.e. just like Johnny Depp’s directorial debut, The Brave, unreleasable). It’s strange to see two directors objectifying Smith, but after After Earth, he doesn’t care. Smith became an actor as the conman in the film version of Six Degrees of Separation, so it’s like a homecoming. In that film, his character overplayed his hand, having the perfect day ‘and adding sex to it’. Focus is like a less than perfect day, and I’d wish they’d taken sex out of it.
Essentially, it is about two big cons, linked only by Jess’s presence. What is she doing in Buenos Aires? Do we really believe that she just there to steal an expensive watch? ‘I like watches,’ she tells us.
Nothing in Focus really makes sense. It doesn’t reinvent Smith as a leading man. Why would he take a film where he is second choice? Perhaps to say to Hollywood, ‘I’m better than After Earth.’ We are supposed to be taken by the chemistry between Smith and Robbie. But I didn’t see it. The two directors should have taken a leaf out of Samuel Beckett’s book: they should have waited for Gosling. There is a sort of twist near the end – an act of violence that you didn’t think the makers were capable of, except it is set up in an earlier dialogue exchange. Focus leaves us feeling out of it, cheated out of the illusion of hope. I found it hard to warm to the characters and didn’t care about the outcome.
Reviewed at Cineworld Haymarket, Screen One, Monday 16 February 2015, 20:15, Unlimited Card holders screening
