At the cinema: Focus
Will Smith has had a chequered film career over the past five years or so, sharing the limelight with son Jaden in flop After Earth, playing a supporting role in bigger flop A New York Winter’s Tale, and only Men In Black 3 providing a hit. Now he’s back, with a role tailor-made for his proven talents as a smooth, sexy, confident, charismatic alpha male. He plays skilled conman Nicky, who gets romantically entangled with his latest protégée (Margot Robbie – ie Leo DiCaprio’s feisty wife in The Wolf Of Wall Street) down in Buenos Aires. Before that, the pair hit New Orleans, in a sequence (fleecing luckless tourists) that rather squandered my rooting interest in the characters. Overall, Focus isn’t really anything we haven’t seen before, but it’s a genial watch, and well-cast. If you don’t fancy it, hot teacher J-Lo being seduced by much-younger Ryan Guzman (Step Up franchise) offers a very guilty pleasure in the giggle-inducing The Boy Next Door. Or else the gang reunites in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – the very definition of a winning formula.
On DVD: Fury
This really is the week for mature, A-list male movie stars. Will Smith (aged 46) is in cinemas, and Brad Pitt (51) is on DVD. Fury tells the story of a US tank crew in the closing months of World War II. Rookie soldier Logan Lerman (the Percy Jackson movies) joins Brad’s tank crew, as SS units put up a spirited Nazi resistance. Shia LaBeouf, minus the brown paper bag on his head, is also in it, as one of the tank’s five-man team. This film is directed by David Ayer, who wrote the excellent Training Day (with Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke), and it’s a fine showcase for Lerman, who proves he’s got a lot more in his tank than was on show in the Percy Jackson movies. If you saw him in The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, you’ll know that already. If you didn’t, that’s also well worth a rent/VOD viewing.
On TV: Cuban Fury (Saturday, Channel 4, 9pm)
The days when the UK film industry was churning out major romantic comedies for the global market (think: Notting Hill) are long gone, but over the last couple of years we’ve seen, on a more modest budgetary level, the likes of I Give It A Year and* Cuban Fury*, with Man Up on its way this spring.
Cuban Fury stars Nick Frost – Simon Pegg’s regular sidekick – as a former teen Latin dancer who long away hung up his Cuban heels. When the lovely Rashida Jones joins his company as his new boss, and reveals a love for salsa, he must pluck up the courage to get back on the dancefloor – and foil obnoxious love rival Chris O’Dowd. Stealing every scene he’s in is Kayvan Novak (Fonejacker, Facejacker) as a fellow dance student. His stuff is so much funnier than everything else in the script, you have got to imagine it’s down to his own demented improvisations. Meanwhile, the ubiquitous Olivia Colman isn’t given a whole lot to do as Nick Frost’s supportive sister.