Overall Rating
 Awesome: 32.08%
Worth A Look: 44.65%
Average: 15.09%
Pretty Bad: 6.29%
Total Crap: 1.89%
9 reviews, 105 user ratings
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| Catch Me If You Can |
by Chris Parry
"If it hadn't said 'directed by Steven Spielberg', I wouldn't have known."
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Some directors are easy to identify just by their style. Show me the first five minutes of a David Lynch movie and I'll know who directed it. Show me the first five of a Spike Lee Joint, and you ain't fooling nobody. Well Steven Spielberg too has his own customary style - generally that first five minutes will introduce the 'little boy lost', smack us about the head with an orchestra and feature a nice big wide shot of a sprawling vista. Not so in Catch Me If You Can, a flick so un-Spielberg that it could have been directed by top drawer director. The 'Berg has given the cast room to move, the story room to develop and the emotions a chance to find their own way out, rather than be extracted by sugary music. I dug this movie. I dug it a lot. It'd be a hard flick not to enjoy.Frank Abagnale Jr (Leonardo DiCaprio) just watched his family disintegrate. Mom's doing the head Rotarian, dad's being permanently harassed by the IRS, nothing seems to be going the way it's supposed to. So Frank, rather than pick a parent to spend his remaining teenage years with, decides to hop a train and hit the city.
While he's there, he finds that making ends meet legally isn't easy, but taking the illegal option certainly is. He starts passing off bad checks, figuring out that airline pilots are instantly trusted and respected, no matter where they go or what they ask for. A uniform later, our boy Frank is flying free cross-county, writing bad checks and moving on the the next city, ammasing well over a million bucks.
But all is not well when the FBI starts sniffing around and before long Agent Handratty (Tom Hanks) is right on his tail. Or at least, where his tail has just been.
Based on the true story of Abagnale and his adventures, it seems that Spileberg knows the story and the cast are all that this film needs to get over on the public, so rather than stitch it all up and tie a nice pink bow around it, Spileberg steps back and let's the big men do their thang. And yeah, Leo DiCaprio, when he's not being a royal pain in the arse of all around him, is a big man in the acting world. Kid can play.
Hanks, for mine, just gets better with every role he's snared in the last eighteen months. Be it in front of the camera (Road to Perdition) or behind it (Band of Brothers, My Big Fat Greek Wedding), he's just proving again and again that he's not the other half of the Hanks/Ryan duo, that he's got the cajones to pull off the impossible and the desire to use them.
And perhaps only someone with the pulling power of Spielberg could run shotgun with him and actually make him better at what he does. Sure, Saving Private Ryan had a few misfires - even some big ones - but Hanks learns and I get the impression Spielberg listens to him. When Band of Brothers came along, gone were the Spielberg formulas and Hanks tears and in their place was simply the best of Saving Private Ryan - the gritty reality. With Catch Me If You Can, they've gone the same route. There's a minimum of padding, a minimum of tearjerking. It's just fun to watch and amazing to try to comprehend this story of a teenage conman that didn't just get everything he wanted, he almost transcended the stigma of being a thief to be a legend.
And that's where perhaps my only bitch with this film lays - that the film truly celebrates this guy and his actions. When $1.3m is stolen from anyone, someone else pays for it and in a big way. Where are the insights into what happened to a bank teller that cashes a dud $1400 check? What do we know about what occurs next day to the hotel clerk that loans a fake airline pilot $300? These people may have lost jobs, maybe they had to repay the loss out of their own pocket, but we never see them once they've been duped. We never see the other side, we're simply asked to gape in awe at what this smart little dude tried, succeeded in and got away with. And even when he gets to prison, he's not really suffering... not really.This beef aside, Catch Me If You Can, if taken without social context, is a fun movie to sink into. DiCaprio doesn't miss a step, Hanks hasn't missed one since 1983, and when it comes right down to it this is a flick that anyone and everyone should really have a good time with.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=6492&reviewer=1
originally posted: 12/28/02 08:53:05
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USA
25-Dec-2002 (PG-13)
UK
N/A
Australia
09-Jan-2003
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