Published
The search that keeps this page alive is not really about a title — it is “the Will Smith and Margot Robbie movie”, asked by people who remember the pairing better than the name. The answer is Focus, from February 2015: a con-artist picture that doubles as the film where Hollywood found out what Margot Robbie could carry.
The answer, and the asterisk
Focus is the Will Smith and Margot Robbie movie in the sense people mean it, the one where the two of them are the whole show. The asterisk is Suicide Squad, one year later, where both appear (Deadshot and Harley Quinn) but share almost no screen time. Two films, one real pairing. This site keeps the full Suicide Squad cast file separately; this page is about the film the query actually wants.
What Focus is
Smith plays Nicky Spurgeon, a third-generation con artist running a large, disciplined crew of pickpockets and short-con specialists. Robbie is Jess Barrett, an amateur who tries to roll him in a hotel room, gets a polite lecture on everything she did wrong, and talks her way into an apprenticeship. The first half is her education during a Super Bowl week in New Orleans, ending in a sting built on a compulsive gambler and a stadium full of planted suggestions. The second half jumps three years to Buenos Aires, where the two meet again on opposite sides of a con involving a racing team, and where neither can tell whether the other’s feelings are real or working capital.
Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who wrote and directed, had pulled the same structural trick in Crazy, Stupid, Love: a glossy genre engine with a relationship story hidden in the chassis. Here the genre engine is authentic to a degree films rarely bother with — sleight-of-hand consultant Apollo Robbins designed the lifts, trained the actors and turns up on screen, and the film’s centrepiece pickpocket montage is his choreography photographed like a dance number.
What it did for the two of them
For Smith, Focus was a deliberate return to charm after a run of heavier swings (the film sells itself almost entirely on his ease), and reviews at the time said so in both directions. For Robbie it was the escalation that mattered: after Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street had introduced her, Focus was the test of whether she could hold a two-hander against one of the biggest stars alive. The consensus that formed, that she not only held it but frequently took it, is the reason the film’s casting is now its most-remembered fact, and the pairing was rebooked for Suicide Squad before Focus had finished its run.
How it landed
The reviews split down the film’s own seam: praise for the chemistry and the surface pleasures, reservations about a plot that cons the audience one twist past its own credibility. It opened at number one in the United States regardless, a modest hit that did exactly what mid-budget star vehicles were built to do, and its species has grown rare enough since that Focus now reads as a late example of the form. The full billed cast, including the supporting hands around the two leads, is in the table below; Robbie’s other file on this site sits with the Suicide Squad squad, and the con-artist tradition it borrows from runs straight back to Fight Club’s unreliable narrators — a different con, the same pleasure of being fooled well.