Focus Review: 8 Reasons Will Smith's New Movie Is A Con

7. Morally Bankrupt Characters Are Presented As Heroes

Will Smith is con-man, which is notoriously a morally questionable career. Most films dealing with such areas tend to contrive reasons why the principled hero is entering a life of crime, giving them a tragic backstory and a wholly evil mark. Not Focus - it treats righteousness like an unnecessary option. Nicky's big hustles are all on people who can afford to lose millions and are clearly of mixed moral standing, which makes him look like a selfish Robin Hood; stood next to Vegas whale Liyuan and violent F1 magnate Garriga he feels like a hero. But to get the millions needed to take on those two Nicky and his thirty-strong team have had to steal wallet after wallet from the innocent, unsuspecting public. And how does the film explain away such unequivocally detestable behaviour? It doesn't, instead hoping the cast's charisma will stop you questioning why the movie expects you to care about uncaring criminals. Laughably, the film doesn't realise this, thinking it's actually dealing with a moral lead - in the final minutes Nicky is described as being uncharacteristically honourable for the profession, making this whole approach even more irritating. More comparisons to The Wolf Of Wall Street are probably not fair (it is one of the best films of the freaking decade), but Scorsese has shown time and again that you can make a viewer care about bad people doing clearly bad things by going into their psychology and presenting it in a rational manner. Focus thinks making nabbing someone's ring off their finger look cool will have the same effect. Nope.