Focus

It's easy enough to imagine why actors are so easily drawn to con-man films. Essentially, the act of taking a mark and getting them to believe anything you tell them is akin to the very art of acting in the first place. You need to make ordinary people believe you are who you say you are and your motivations are what you tell them. It's somewhat more difficult, however, to understand why writers and directors make this same choice. It's not enough that the con-man genre tends toward the ham-handed and thoroughly implausible, it also has no choice but to telegraph its hand. You know going in that the film will end with a climax -- generally a tragic one -- that is all just a final twist, the "long-con" coming to its full completion at last. Every con-man film is like an M. Night Shyamalan flick: If you know the twist is coming, it's a lot easier to spot -- unless, of course, the producers cheat like crazy to throw you off the scent.

The best of these films can still take that cold steel box of a plot twist and do some admirably twisty things with it -- it's part of the job of the genre filmmaker to shoulder the considerable narrative burdens of the form and still make it worth our while (after all, no one cares that romantic comedies have to telegraph their couple finally getting together in similar fashion) -- but more often than not, the film cheats its way into your confidence in order to set up a laughably far-fetched scheme that couldn't possibly hold water.

Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's romantic con-man caper stars Will Smith, seemingly on the comeback trail after his long-dormant career hit a nadir with Shyamalan's doofy After Earth. Smith is paired with up-and-coming Aussie It-Girl Margot Robbie. They play a pair of mismatched con artists who meet in New York, seem to fall for each other in New Orleans (only to split under rueful circumstances), and reunite in Buenos Aires, when they find themselves working at cross-purposes on another con.

Tony Gilroy mined similar territory in his vastly superior Duplicity, but Ficarra and Requa don't have nearly the inventiveness or dedication to emotional misdirection as the award-winning director and screenwriter. Instead, they play the film off as a kind of charm offensive, with Smith, Robbie and Adrian Martinez, who plays another con-man and friend to the pair, taking turns looking adorable and running their lines with a cat-like purr. A lot of attention is paid to the coupling of Smith and Robbie, even though at different times they play each other mercilessly, to the point where you can't be sure they actually even can stand each other, let alone suddenly be in love.

And that is perhaps the film's weakest point. Upon being played badly in New Orleans by Smith's Nicky, Robbie's Jess is left on her own, and the merry band of lovable criminals (who just happen to steal the watches, wallets, credit card numbers and identities of hapless citizens like you and me to make their living) all move on with their lives, until three years later, in South America, where Nicky and Jess happen to run into each other again. In that time, we are asked to believe Nicky, who truly seemed like a callous sociopath earlier, has somehow grown a conscience and fallen in love in absentia, happening upon Jess by accident but then pursuing her doggedly until she comes back around to him. Given that we do not see any of this metamorphosis take place, nor that we are presented any reason to believe anything that comes out of either one of their mouths, the reliability of the film's emotional core feels hollow. It's a core of Styrofoam peanuts enveloped by a pretty facade.

It's also slicker than crude oil, with Smith and Robbie tooling around in stunning hotel rooms and top-of-the-line merchandise. But what really suggests the film's myriad of failures is the cheap trick they pull at the end for the film's climactic twist. Yes, it's something you absolutely won't see coming, but not because it has somehow managed to outsmart you. It's because it makes not a single lick of sense.

For all its sloppy gambits, it still has a few moments (a scene with BD Wong as a madly enthusiastic gambler at a championship football game -- decidedly not the NFL -- is reasonably clever and well-managed), but nothing that comes together terribly well when all is said and done. Not that I would know, but I'm willing to bet the hardest part of the long-con is sticking the landing, and getting away clean with your illegally gotten gains. By that criteria, this film never would have made it that far. It would be stuck in the clink, wondering about all the ways it went wrong in its life.

MovieStyle on 02/27/2015