Will Smith FINALLY gets White Love Interest in FOCUS

I bet that helps keep the writing fresh and the quality high by avoiding overdoing it. I'm glad to see Luther is coming back as well. Still trying to get into Season Two of Broadchurch.

 

Movie was mad boring. Will lost his mojo.

 

7 out of 10.

The second half (Argentina) does not hold up as well as the first and the plot is a bit too muddled during this stretch of the movie. Another flaw is that Margot Robbie's character doesn't progress as much as one would think after three years.


That being said I still liked it overall. I believe folks in general would appreciate it more if they went in thinking of it as a romance film with the highstakes of the con world as merely a backdrop rather than thinking it is a movie about con men/con women. People who expect Ocean's eleven are bound to be disappointed. as Smith's character even says in the film...this isn't about being on the hunt for the big score in which all the participants get to become rich and live happily ever after. These guys were more small time, more day-to-day, more realistic. And an interesting movie could have been made focusing on just that type of small-time thievery and the fascinating people who inhabit such a world. But this movie's intent, based upon interviews with the writers/directors, was always centered on the relationship between two individuals, just like their previous films.

The music was great. The cinematography was picture perfect. The locations were fabulous. While the movie doesn't rise to the heights of a Cary Grant-Grace Kelly classic, this movie did have the vibe and feel of an old-time Hollywood motion picture. Perhaps I can appreciate that more than some people.It was clearly going after an adult audience considering it got a R rating.

Will Smith and Robbie did very fine work. It is one of Smith's better and more restrained performances. Let's call it an adult role. But Robbie impressed me most of all despite the writing letting her down in the second half. She is so different in this than in Wolf of Wall Street. And, wow, she is stunning to look at; worth the price of admission alone. She and Smith really clicked which is important. Just as important is that the filmmakers did not shy away from bed scenes and intimacy between them. As the two stars said it was first and foremost a love story. Even for those who don't think this is a very good movie, it is still nonetheless a giant step forward in terms of presenting BM and WW pairings on the big screen. And such a pairing hasn't been box office poison. The movie has done decent business and since it only cost fifty million to make it will make back its cash after its worldwide take.



SPOILER:


Must add that many have gotten confused with the Gerald McRaney scenes between him and Will Smith. The complaint is that those moments didn't make sense in the end because they were working together on a con all along and yet stayed in character when they appeared to be relatively alone. But people are getting that wrong. Those scenes were not as those two characters pretending to play their assigned roles in the con, they were instead scenes in which they are interacting as "father" and "son". We are getting a glimpse of the dynamic of their true relationship. For example when McRaney is asking Smith when did drinking become part of the plan and then scolded him to do his job, he was not referring to the phony scheme that the race car owner and Smith had agreed to but rather the con that Mcraney and Smith had apparently came up with before they set things in motion in Buenos Aries. That was a "get it together and don't fuck this up" pep talk from father figure to son.

Same applies when McRaney is snooping around Smith's bedroom following his night with Robbie. Everything McRaney says to Smith is not him being in character but instead his true feelings about how Smith's generation is soft. The key thing is McRaney is unaware that Robbie and Smith are involved; he's likely unaware that the two even have history. McRaney and Robbie are not aware of the other in terms of the relationship each have with Smith's character. It is this element that saves the second half of the film. I liked McRaney's character and love how in the end he took all the money because of his slight disappointment that Smith is a good guy ho let his feelings get in the way of business.

 

White males have been paired onscreen with women who could be the age of their daughters, granddaughters for decades. So when people act as if it is NOW a problem because of "Focus" then it suggests to me they are using that as cover for some other issue they have with the film.

 

I loved it, tuned in every week, watched every episode, and then ABC unceremoniously yanked it off the air.

 

Loved that show too. One of those few Aussie actresses on the screen who is confortable with a brother.

 

Focus performed well in international markets.

 

Nice to know

It has a black lead/co-lead or whatever and interracial...so it's nice to see it perform well financially because some people still have a problem with those surface attributes

Actual ratings on the other hand.....