I wouldn't consider myself a huge Smith fan, but when this guy turns it on, he turns it on. And in Focus, I thought he did enough, enough for me to believe him.
Playing opposite him was Margot Robbie, whom I have been following since her time with a very good TV series that nobody watched, "Pan Am". It lasted only a season but that's where I got to know the beauty and talent of Robbie.
And Focus was her follow-up to a great performance in The Wolf Of Wall Street, before headlining in DC's Suicide Squad, where she's also a cast alongside Smith.
I thought these two played off each other well enough to sell me the movie. With a con movie, what we want is to not be able to guess who's playing who. The writing of Focus by the duo Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who also directed, tried to give us that sensibility. Mostly it worked.
They used a few twists in the plot to try to throw both the audience and the characters off, nothing too clever but still quite effective.
Potential SPOILER ahead in this next paragraph.
What I would have liked to see more of was the establishing of the feeling of love between the two leads. I thought they jumped the gun too quickly with too quick a setup in the first act. But they sold it. And the way the movie was directed and paced, it wasn't too jarring.
However, I wasn't satisfied with how the movie ended. I thought the writing was quite weak towards the end when that should have been its strongest.
But with a good supporting cast in Gerald McRaney, as well as Adrian Martinez to provide some humour, I thought the movie was good enough.
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