Focus * * 1/2

This reminded me of  Charles Dickens, which might seem a weird thing to say about a film set in America in contemporary times.  But the story-line had touches of Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and a few other typical Dickensian features such as long last fathers etc.

Starring Will  Smith, it’s a story of professional pickpockets and shysters.  We learn that as a boy his Step Dad - like Fagin - had taken him in and taught him the skill. A skill which he has honed in his adult years to an almost paranormal standard.  He recruits a young woman (Margot Robbie) to join his gang of associates. She is similarly skilled and has the extra asset of her distracting good looks. Whereas with Oliver Twist we were were dealing with dreadfully poor orphaned children stealing off the wealthy because they had no choice, this film asks us to befriend selfish lazy grown-ups stealing precious, highly personal, items off hardworking honest people: Wedding rings, engagement rings, wallets with family photos, inherited jewelry, wallets and purses that might contain all that a person has to get home.  You watch them work their way through a crowd and are in awe of their skills but if  you think about it they are disgusting!  So it’s a mystery to me that the filmmakers didn't think that audiences might not take too kindly to these people.  It’s only their charm as actors that get them through. However, their conduct becomes  a little more tolerable in the second half when they start pulling a heist on the Grand Prix Motor Racing scene.  Not that F1 teams are necessarily deserving of being robbed but you don’t feel so sorry for them.  

It’s a clever and entertaining film which - like Dickens - asks us to accept impossible plot twists and ludicrous surprises, but unlike a Dickens story there is much more glamour than squalor.  I just wish they had these charming rogues "focus" on ripping off a more deserving target so we could cheer them on a bit.