Film Review - Focus

Will Smith does his version of the big con, while Margot Robbie provides an excellent distraction. 

I loved the first half of this one. The set up was good, the standard look behind-the-scenes of the con games was very well done and pretty funny in parts. Then Brennan Brown's Germanic fixer Horst leaves and the second half is a bit of a let down.

There are some great little confidence tricks on show in the film, but nothing you haven't seen already somewhere else and there are a lot where the tricks are done just by camera trickery or selected cuts. The most obvious of them being the pickpocketing training scenes where the angles are all too close for you to see them cheating with camera and editing tricks rather than actually teaching. 

Then all of this evaporates in the second half.

There isn't really much of a confidence trick going on in the second half. it is just a cheap software theft which could have been achieved by the 'inside man' any time in the previous 2 years. 

Also the ending has been telegraphed. You are told in the first half of the film EXACTLY what they are going to do at the end, who is going to do it, why they are going to do it, … all a bit too obvious. And the twist to get you there is so blatant that you get it 5 minutes before it happens.  

And to finish it, they leave a room full of ferraris, by driving away in a stolen Fiat Doblo?! And the holes in the ending are fairly huge. The idea of the big con is to leave the victim with no means or motive to pursue or to have them hog-tied by the consequences of that pursuit, but in this film the 'victim' has no such impediment to just chasing them all down straight after the credits roll.

Overall 6 / 10 but 5 of those for the first half of the movie and the 6th for Margot Robbie's bikini.