Critics reviews

This is all great fun, as indeed is most of the movie. Focus is the kind of film you'll watch on pay-TV a year from now and wonder why it's so underrated – but it also lacks something, a firm base or (ironically) a focus point.

It's almost impossible, while watching the movie, not to catch it red-handed; it takes a special clumsiness on the part of the filmmakers to let the viewer's focus drift. Ficarra and Requa seem in love with their script from the start. They observe the stars too little, observe too little of the action that they set in motion, and drive it ahead relentlessly.

Ficarra and Requa's last movie was Crazy, Stupid, Love, another ornate, lousily titled adventure in comic romance. There's nothing in Focus as absurdly sexy as the "Let's get out of here" montage they build around Ryan Gosling, or as hot as the long seduction sequence they create between him and Emma Stone. But there's a low-stakes heat here that you appreciate.

Focus' problem isn't that its stars lack charm, but that it's squeezed into tight spaces between protracted explanations of setups, backstories, and twists—a poor example of the every-shot-must-convey-narrative-information school of filmmaking.

Ficarra and Requa made their names with I Love You Philip Morris, an imperfect but oddly wise and outlandish comedy about a different pair of crooks. Unlike that film's near-absurdist style, Focus is shot and edited largely for zip and sturdy competence, which sadly does nothing to even out the filmmakers' erratic tone or convoluted script.

[In the third act,] the double-crosses and deceptions pile up (none too convincingly) and the movie goes irreparably slack—a problem that also plagued Ficarra and Requa's relationship comedy Crazy Stupid Love, which, similarly, began boisterously and then turned irritatingly sluggish. Swindler cinema is only as good as its architecture; once the big picture is revealed, viewers should be thrilled at having had one pulled over on them. Focus, sadly, leaves you feeling bilked.