CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (2002) **1/2 The alternative guide on how to join the FBI. Leonardo DiCaprio projects the suitable mix of brainy, shaky, and righteously indignant as the master check-bouncer, and Tom Hanks is reasonably serviceable as the really dull guy with dim lights on somewhere inside (though I'm uncertain as to whether that's type-casting at this point). It's an entertaining movie, I never caught myself wishing it would hurry up. I did, however, find myself hoping that they wouldn't insult my intelligence by trying to pass it off as "based on fact," which they did. Come on!?? The FBI is following this guy, and almost catches him in Atlanta, from which he fled with a girl from New Orleans, and they know that he won't change his name, but they don't have a clue as to where he went? Don't even check, for example, the girl's house? Or a master con-man is left in the bathroom alone as the plane is landing?! Or he's left on a hospital bed unattended with the door open? Fucking, please. The problem is Steven Spielberg at the helm. He either doesn't know how (though Jaws would tend to refute this, however sanitized from Peter Benchley's novel it was) to produce anything gritty, or he just doesn't want to. Either way, he should stick to plots that don't suffer from intrusive airbrushing. And the little magical touches--the dollars floating in the air--you just want E.T. to show up make everything good, no doubt by phoning home. Spielberg probably got what he could out of Hanks, but you're telling me that he couldn't have got more street out of DiCaprio, Christopher Walken (!), and Martin Sheen? Anyone who didn't laugh when Spielberg threw the clichéd "where they're happy now" closing statement onto the screen is compelling evidence on why con-men are often so successful.
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