Movie reviews: Focus, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Catch Me Daddy

“It’s all about Focus (15A),” super-thief Nicky (Will Smith) tells his protégé Jess (Margot Robbie) as they plan to pickpocket as many Superbowl fans as is humanly possible over a single weekend. It’s good advice: as any con artist knows, the art of the steal lies in the ability to distract the mark’s attention at the crucial moment.

Unfortunately for the cool, composed Nicky, his weakness for gambling and good burgundy is compounded by his unexpected romance with Jess, none of which is particularly helpful when it comes time to focus on the big picture.

Slickly produced and gleamingly polished, Focus offers a whimsical take on classic con flicks such as Ocean’s Eleven, with Nicky’s ability to coordinate industrial-scale street scams somewhat implausible from the off.

It’s obvious, however, that writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa are as interested in paying tongue-in-cheek homage to such movies as they are in constructing their own, and the whimsical tone allows for plenty of humour, not least when Will Smith is in freewheeling form, all smooth patter and charming seduction, although even his super-charged performance is overshadowed by a smouldering turn from Margot Robbie as an ingénue femme fatale.

A story full of hairpin twists and turns provides for a fast-paced tale of double-dealings and triple-crosses, although the fact that Ficarra and Requa try to pull off two big scams, instead of focusing on one major heist, results in a fun but rather superficial movie that delivers more glitter than gold.

A sequel to the surprise smash hit from 2011, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (PG) opens with hotel manager Sonny (Dev Patel) and Muriel (Maggie Smith) seeking to expand their empire in India and courting investment from an American hotel chain that specialises in catering for guests of an advanced age.

When the chain’s inspector, Guy (Richard Gere), arrives in India, Sonny is embarrassingly attentive in his bid to impress him, much to the annoyance of his fiancée Sunaina (Tina Desai), with whom Sonny is supposed to be planning his wedding.

That central plot-line is interwoven with a number of others, as many of the original cast members — among them Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup — return to pick up the threads of their stories.

It would have been easy, of course, for director John Madden to simply remake the first movie, but while many of the elements that created that success are recreated here (the setting is as visually stunning as before, and the hotel retains its ramshackle Fawlty Towers-style charm), this is a more poignant film, particularly as Muriel receives some bad news early on.

That said, and as you might expect given the stellar cast, the story offers a wide variety of sub-plots, from confused identities and minor mysteries to frustrated romance and the importance of aging (dis)gracefully, all of it infused with a genteel humour.

The experienced cast deliver quality performances again, although Dev Patel is the undoubted star of the show as the irrepressibly optimistic and hilariously loquacious host.

With its suggestion of innocence and childhood games, Catch Me Daddy (16s) is a darkly ironic title to a film that is unremittingly grim in tone. Fun-loving Pakistani teenager Laila (Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) runs away from home with her boyfriend Aaron (Connor McCarron) to hide out in a caravan in the North of England.

Pursued by Laila’s brother Zaheer (Ali Ahmad) and his friends, and locals Barry (Barry Nunney) and Tony (Gary Lewis), Laila and Aaron find themselves running for their lives as Laila’s family vow to avenge her lost honour.

Co-written and directed by Daniel Wolfe in his feature-length debut, Catch Me Daddy functions as the blackest of noir thrillers (Laila and Aaron are, as in all the best noirs, doomed to their fate by forces beyond their control) and also a contemporary commentary on cultural and religious assimilation (or lack of same) in the UK.

Sameena Jabeen Ahmed and Connor McCarron provide strong performances as the star-crossed lovers, their blend of street-wise smarts and naïve belief in the power of love a compelling one, but much of the story’s malign energy is derived from Ali Ahmad and the shaven-headed Barry Nunney as the remorseless, relentless hunters.

Wolfe has a good eye for a bleak setting, the windswept moors and poverty-stricken small towns of Northern England providing a kind of visual poetic fallacy of Laila and Aaron’s plight, and while it all adds up to very difficult viewing, particularly the denouement, it is absolutely riveting throughout.