Focus review: too smooth for its own good

Here's one thing that tells you a film needs to be taken out behind the bins and shot like an ailing horse: they play Sympathy for the Devil when the main character embarks on a morally dubious enterprise. The tom-toms start. The guitar kicks in. The "woo-woos" emerge. Let's hope they don't go to the UK capital. I'm not sure I can bear a montage of beefeaters layered over London Calling.

That’s the level we are at with Will Smith’s latest attempt to distract us from the news that he’s 46.

What we have here is a crack at the trickiest of genres: the hustle movie. You can construct elegant characters. You can hone the dialogue to perfection.

But, if the plot doesn’t tick as smoothly as a Swiss watch, then you may as well not bother removing the lens cap. Even the great David Mamet occasionally fails at such enterprises.

Focus tocks like a cheap carriage clock that's been run over almost as often as its been flung down the stairs.

Will Smith is Nicky, an archetypically smooth hustler who, for the purposes of one big con, picks up a spirited young woman named Jess (the same Margot Robbie who is old enough to be Smith’s daughter). To say that the scam doesn’t make sense is to err on the side of kindness. They may as well have bought a lottery ticket.

No matter. The couple soon spilt up and, after a caption allows time to pass, encounter one another again in Argentina. What is going in with this motor-racing magnate? Nothing is what it seems? Nobody is who he or she pretends to be? You won’t care.

Everything about the film is too smooth for its own good. When the soundtrack isn't offering us Sympathy for the Devil, it's spitting out endless bland cocktail funk or pseudo acid jazz. Smith is on auto-pilot. A desperate Robbie has the look of a woman abandoned by her pals while holidaying among hostile street hawkers.

You, sir, are not The Sting.