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

5. Obvious Songs Lazily Justified

Is there anything worse than a film using Sympathy For The Devil in its soundtrack to signify personal demons? The song's one of The Rolling Stones' classics, but it's so on-the-nose and overused that to have it pop up in a movie is a cliché of the laziest order. So when it rears its head in Focus, played at three distinct moments, the movie's unsubtle desires are laid bare. Once again, sorry for the Scorsese reference, but boy is he someone who gets this as well. In Goodfellas alone he shows incredible deftness. Atlantis for the murder of Billy Batts? Layla for Jimmy's murder spree? They're off the wall choices that encapsulate the time setting and juxtapose to the horrific on screen events. Using a song from the early seventies to punctuate a gambling scene in 2015, however, is just out of touch. The film does retroactively attempt to justify its inclusion, although the explanation is a little strained - wŭ, pronounced woo, is Mandarin for five, leading to the film concluding Sympathy's repeated "woo, woo" is fifty-five (an important number in part of the plot), which is really a lazy use of Google Translate - and not enough to make up for it. Focus is full of these obviously-picked music cues, and while individual moments gain a touch of class from their inclusion, the overall effect is one of the film having an incredibly conservative reach.