Focus The Rewatchables
Focus poster
Focus

What’s Aged the Best?

Smith-Robbie chemistry; music choices; title said in the movie; Will Smith's collared shirts; pharmacy car-crash sequence; non-lethal staged shooting; thief lessons

In the discussion (11)
Approx. transcript time · 00:57:37Read transcript
  • The Will Smith and Margot Robbie chemistry is listed first.
  • Most of the music choices are liked, including the opening song, Iggy Pop's Gimme Danger and a White Bird song.
  • The title is said in the movie ('this is a game ... of focus'), which always wins a heart.
  • Will Smith's clothes, especially checkered collared shirts, are elite, though the decade they aim for is hard to place.
  • Smith's S curl hair is a sticking point: sometimes it looks fantastic, sometimes terrible.
  • The hair may be meant to make McRaney plausibly his biological father; the film says he is 'basically my father' and leaves the biology ambiguous.
  • A three-years-later dateline graphic is welcomed by one side, while the other asks why a caper needs a dateline, unlike Siriana or a Bourne movie; the location is corrected from Buenos Aires to New Orleans.
  • The bad guy buying products at the pharmacy for the car accident is a really good sequence.
  • The deliberate non-lethal shooting, aimed between ribs, is hard to pull off but works here, called the best one ever seen.
  • Thief lessons are liked: give stolen cards back within an hour, married guys make the best marks, sell everything, take no chances.
  • A never-pickpocketed participant doubts anyone could take his watch and calls her stealing the Piage watch at the end impossible; the cuts on every move and one visible wrist-wiggle suggest liberties.