Starring Josh Blacker and Christopher Young. Rated PG.

According to IMDb, the title Focus has been used for features, shorts, and tube series at least 32 times. The reasons are obvious for anything relating to the basic elements of motion-picture storytelling, less so with a dud like the Will Smith con-man flick of just a few months ago.

This particular Focus comes by the name honestly, since two-thirds of its almost 90 minutes are spent with a focus group. This device, however, is better suited to TV-episode length, as in the Frasier episode that found our short-fused radio host obsessing on a single holdout within a group of randomly chosen citizens who otherwise adored him. Here, a sitcom premise is stretched to diminishing returns. Office Space it ain’t.

There is some talent on offer in this Vancouver-shot effort. Shaven-headed Josh Blacker is effective, in a neurotic Jason Statham way, as Troy, a product developer at a sketchily defined company run by a remote figure (veteran character actor William B. Davis) who only shows up at the end. Troy’s previous project went south, and not in the export sense, so a lot is riding on his kitchen-aid tool, which controls appliances from your smartphone (an app app, one could say).

Troy is also under pressure to hide his verboten romance with a coworker. Rebecca Davis is okay in this thankless part, the tedious voice-of-wisdom nag that women usually play in ensemble comedies like this. Toby Hargrave is amusing in the Zach Galifianakis role, a burly tech guy tasked with recording focus-group data. The cast standout, surprisingly, is writer-director Christopher Young, as the beyond-baffled new guy who “slept his way to the middle” by marrying the boss’s daughter, and has been inexplicably assigned to run Troy’s crucial FG. Young gives his own lines—some pretty pedestrian—enough spin to take the tale into the wilder territory it needs.

Still, the movie is essentially sunk by its decision to rest everything on this one unconvincingly disastrous event, with too much corny stuff coming from a cackling rival (Ryan Beil, who comes across as Jon Lovitz playing Simon Legree). The rest is pretty much a blur.