Lots of old pros telling an amazing story - yet plays like a TV movie!

Rating: 6/10 (2 November 2004)

A young man with a sharp brain and the face of someone much older takes the fast track to riches by way of wholesale cheque fraud.
I know of only one or two scripts that have been going the rounds longer before being actually made. Caligula - the troubled Roman epic - is probably the one you have heard of.
You can see why the original book (which shares the movie title) was hot-to-trot. The studio execs must have viewed it as a sure-fire winner that no one could really go wrong with. The only problem being the lack of talent waiting to take on this fish-in-a-barrel project. Maybe some projects are a little too obvious - Cleopatra anyone?
Spielberg didn't really want to direct this one and through politics to complicated to go in to here had to switch from producer to director. His heart is not in it - so he just goes for the plod-plod-plod movie-by-numbers approach. Sad to see him not really extending his wonderful cineast brain.
I read up heavily on the true life case of Frank Abigale Jnr and even read the press library interviews that he made after seeing the film. His escape from a plane showed that he was a true life James Bond! I always say: Knowledge is power!
While the script was true in all its main facts it exaggerates the state of the French prison - that while tough it was not as tough as this. Although it was no holiday camp either. It also skims over how he got to practise law - the reason given here is a classic of stating selective truths.
(He flunked the exam several times and was allowed to view his mistakes. There may have been bribery involved as well.)
Tom Hanks and DiCaprio play off each other well, but they don't really have a lot to do with each other. The phone calls are a fabrication. They are really working in their own little bubble that only collide every now and then.
What is the moral here? That if you say your name is Joe Blow and you are an airline pilot people believe you. That if you put as much effort in to crime as you do in to a real job it can pay better? Life has moved on since those days. CCTV, computers, the Internet, you wouldn't last five minutes doing all this today.
The saddest thing is that despite his wealth Frank never looks happy. Not here anyway.Money doesn't make you happy seems the closing moral - but a look around the set of this film would quickly show that to be a lie.