In 2001, Steven Soderbergh remade the Rat Pack’s caper film, Ocean’s 11. The result was one of the year’s most exhilarating and fun movies to watch. It used to be that you could find movies like this every summer in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s with films like Jaws, Star Wars, Superman, Indiana Jones and Back to the Future in theaters. This hasn’t been the case during the last decade though. The aforementioned movies, while not necessarily rivaling Des Cartes or Shakespeare in terms of depth or allegory, delivered entertainment in droves and allowed audiences to be transported into another world for two hours, free to marvel at the spectacles taking place on the silver screen. Director Steven Spielberg’s latest film, Catch Me If You Can, is the most recent entry into this type of top-flight popcorn entertainment.

Leonardo DiCaprio stars in Catch Me If You Can as Frank Abagnale Jr (though this is based on a true story, most of the information in the film has been tweaked to serve a better cinematic purpose). Taught from an early age to respect those who have money, sixteen year old Frank heads out to live on his own in protest of his family’s disintegration upon learning that his parents are getting divorced. Unable to secure any kind of real job, Abagnale resorts to life as a petty con-artist to make ends meet. Before long, Abagnale has conned his way into receiving millions of dollars, become certified as a doctor and nabs a position as an assistant district attorney in Louisiana. With these sizeable ill-gotten gains adding up, federal agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks) begins to move in an attempt to catch Abagnale.

The joy of Catch Me If You Can comes with the exquisite nature of the chase between Hanratty and Abagnale. Abagnale’s choice to be a professional con man is a lonely decision. Always forced to run and change his identity to stay out of jail, Abagnale is unable to form many lasting relationships with people; his relationship with his father (Christopher Walken) is about the only significant relationship in his life, minus Hanratty’s presence. And thus, Hanratty and Abagnale form a weird sort of ‘because-we-can’ adversarial relationship.

From this comes the delectable set-up and pay-off portion of Jeff Nathanson’s script. Just as Hanratty begins to close in on Abagnale, Abagnale will invariably concoct a new and far more amusing escape than ever before (the picture to the right shows Abagnale with seven flight attendants that he has unwittingly made his accomplices. Together, the eight of them walk right past security at the airport without an eyebrow ever being raised.).

Delightful and charming, Catch Me If You Can was an incredibly entertaining film.

chris neumer

yes, it's true:

In real life, there was no Carl Hanratty. He was made from a collection of different agents who chased after Frank Abagnale Jr.