"They're never going to catch you, Frank."

Rating: 7/10 (30 November 2017)

Well, I've seen the movie but I still can't believe how a teenager pulled off the stunts that Frank Abagnale Junior (Leonardo DiCaprio) got away with. It's probably a good reflection of how clueless society must have been in the Sixties, a time when I was in high school myself. Frank Jr. had a pretty good role model for his conniving ways in the person of his father (Christopher Walken). I guess you could say like father, like son in this instance, although DiCaprio's character took it to the nth degree impersonating an airline pilot, doctor and lawyer.
Obviously one can't doubt that a lot of this chicanery went on in the life of the real Abagnale Jr., but the picture is very much a superficial glossing over about what the guy got away with, for the amount of time he got away with it. As the detective hot on Abagnale's trail, Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks) starts the picture out as something of a caricature of the bumbling FBI agent that gets suckered when he first meets up with his quarry, but eventually settles into his role as the responsible guy who brought the faker to justice.
What I would like to have seen was some closure to the opening scene that had the 'To Tell the Truth' tease. That looked like a real clip of Dorothy Kilgallen asking a question, and it would have been cool if the film makers had used the rest of it to show the real Frank Abagnale, Jr. Instead, and I found this to be a fascinating piece of trivia, the real Frank Abagnale Jr. appeared in the movie as a French policeman taking DiCaprio into custody. So I guess you can add 'actor' to the list of his other dubious aliases.