A Con Story in More Ways Than One (Spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (30 December 2002)

To judge from the comments posted so far, few if any viewers have actually read the book on which this movie is based, which may explain the generally good reception. However, if you have read the book, as I have, you are in for a disconcerting experience, because roughly 75% of it has been altered, invented, and/or omitted in the transition to screenplay.
Yes, the movie merely says it's "inspired" by Abagnale's book, and we all know that movies have to punch up autobiograpical material in places to appeal to movie audiences. And 2 hours inevitably requires compressing (and discarding) a lot of material.
But the problem with "Catch Me" is that the alterations often don't make sense even from a movie point of view. For instance, early in the movie Abagnale uses a bogus check to "pay" a hooker. This scene comes out of nowhere, is played entirely for (minor) laughs, and is promptly forgotten. In the book, the event appears much later, and Abagnale makes clear that this broke his own personal code of only ripping off banks and similar institutions, not people, and was justified only because she came on to him under false pretenses. This interesting moral nuance is thus completely lost in the movie, rendering the scene pointless.
Also, incomprehensibly, the movie fails to follow Abagnale on his European adventures, including his amazing "marketing" scam involving unsuspecting would-be "stews" (which is instead implausibly turned into a ruse to get past Hanratty at Miami Intl Airport). This story, which ends with his getting ratted out by a French former girlfriend and thrown in an appalling French prison, is far more dramatic, and cinematic, than the heavily abbreviated rendition of it in the movie.
Even more unsatisfiying is the omission of Abagnale's hilariously brazen escape from the Atlanta prison where he is initially transferred after being returns to the States, not to mention his first close brush with Hanratty, or his near-fatal slip-up involving a forged check with his real name on it. Why call a movie "Catch Me If You Can" if you are going to leave the book's most memorable escapes on the cutting room floor?
Spielberg's apparent decision to cut the book's heady mix of sex, cons and exotic locations in favor of a trite (and contrived) psychological subplot about Frank Jr.'s Oedipal problems, only succeeds in robbing the story of the precise reasons we go to see films about such a James Bond-like figure in the first place (the film's dashing title sequence hints at the movie that could have been). "Catch Me If You Can" was moreover an autobiography, not a work of fiction. What Spielberg gives us is an imitation of that autobiography. In short, the film is itself a con, and only a mildly good one at that. Looks like audiences are too fixated on the pin stripes (see the movie to get the reference) to care.