Man, remember Will Smith? I mean, sure, it’s hard to forget him; he’s been one of the biggest movie stars in the world for well over 20 years at this point, and he seems to have made a PR recovery from smacking the hell out of Chris Rock over a dumb G.I. Jane joke on the night he also won his Academy Award for King Richard. He was just in theaters and all over Netflix with the summer hit Bad Boys For Life, doing plenty of his movie-star thing. But on the heels of bringing back that franchise for maintenance and alternating it with awards bait (King Richard; Emancipation), Smith hasn’t been flexing his star muscle so much as protecting it – protecting it from movies like Focus, which back in 2015 felt like a sure sign that his career wasn’t quite hitting its usual heights.
Margot Robbie, meanwhile, remains front of mind for Hollywood, even though she hasn’t appeared in a movie in over a year. Barbie gave her the movie star mega-bump she seemed to be looking for, and now her next moves have become headline news. Focus, opposite Smith, was arguably her real leading role in a big movie, and a reminder that she’s been a fixture for over a decade, and that’s spent much of that time looking for grown-up roles in grown-up movies, even when dealing with pure entertainment.
It’s impossible to tell whether Will Smith nostalgia or Margot Robbie hunger is more responsible for getting Focus into the upper reaches of Netflix’s Top 10 charts, or if maybe the scales have balanced in a way that teaming them now would get a new movie closer to the level of Suicide Squad, their superhero-buoyed second movie together, than the much lower-grossing Focus. Regardless, it can’t be much consolation nearly a decade after its disappointing box office run.
Early on in Will Smith’s career, he starred in Six Degrees of Separation and (in)famously refused to film a gay scene that was integral to the plot. So it’s not much of a surprise that Smith has spent the rest of his A-List career avoiding any kind of nudity in his films. Not all that surprising from the guy whose rap records were similarly squeaky clean.
[Where to stream Six Degrees of Separation]
Or anyway, not to the money guys. (Can’t you picture current WB stooge David Zaslav squashing a Harley Quinn movie entirely in a panic after Focus failed to reach blockbuster heights?) To John Requa and Glen Ficarra, the writing-directing team who made the movie, it must be vindicating that maybe this con-artist romance has some kind of staying power reminiscent of the subgenre’s classics like The Lady Eve or The Sting, even if it’s not quite on that level. Smith plays Nicky, head of a ring of thieves and con artists who pull jobs big and small, who meets Jess (Robbie), an aspiring con artist and quick study. He takes her on as an apprentice of sorts, but they also fall in love, possibly; who can tell, right?
Con artist movies are particularly well-suited to star vehicles, and not just because it helps for the central con to have believable charisma at its center. They’re also enjoyable because on some level, these movies admit to the inherent cheat-code of that charisma – that some people have ineffably magical qualities that create a practical yearning to believe in them, even if all signs point to deception. It’s not just about being, as Zoolander would say, really really ridiculously good-looking – though Smith and Robbie certainly are that – but about selling the whole glamorous package. In this case, that means pushing the idea that they really could be in love with one another despite their duplicity, and that we might really care whether they are.
Neither of them are giving their best-ever performance in Focus, and they’re not starring in the best-ever con movie, or even the best of this general era. (That might be The Brothers Bloom.) Smith is in slick-charmer mode, and Robbie doesn’t get as many zingers as she should, or as rich a characterization as the best screwball heroines; she even winds up reusing some of her line readings and intonations in her subsequent Harley Quinn movies. But that artifice, which if anything feels more pronounced years later, doesn’t hurt a movie where some of the romance and excitement comes from not knowing if either character is accurately expressing the feelings they clearly have for each other.
Ficarra and Requa are better-known for comedies, and in fact their earlier con picture I Love You, Phillip Morris is a wilder, funnier, more genuinely unpredictable take on the genre. (Crazy Stupid Love, meanwhile, is an actual con.) But Focus is a reminder of the time when “big studio movie” meant a little more guaranteed production value: Great use of locations (including a snow-covered section of the Lincoln Center complex in New York City), stars gorgeously lit, and rich colors. Seriously, there are more colors in this movie than in any superhero picture of the past five years.
It’s possible that a movie about lying for money wouldn’t play so endearingly in 2024, anyway, but maybe it would be nice to find out for sure. Early in the movie, Nicky disabuses Jess of the notion that his con crew will take down one big mega-score to fund a disappearance into the sunset. This is a “volume business,” he says – something that used to be more true of Warner Bros. itself, which released many types of movies all year long, some of which would hit big enough to make up for those that didn’t. Even in 2015, the turn away from this type of movie had begun, which makes Focus, if not an actual con itself, sort of a half-truth about what movies looked like in the middle of the 2010s. They did not all have Margot Robbie in a skin-tight red dress walking through a blue-and-purple-lit club, or Will Smith cheekily explaining the psychology behind reusing an overfamiliar soundtrack cue like “Sympathy for the Devil.” But it’s the most effective kind of con: One you want fervently to be true.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
