Catch Me If You Can (Rental) (2002)

This review is sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Adventure	Main Menu Introduction Menu Animation & Audio Scene Selection Anim & Audio
Rating
Year Of Production	2002
Running Time	134:57
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (63:06)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Steven Spielberg
Studio Distributor	Universal Pictures Home Video	Starring	Tom Hanks Leonardo DiCaprio Christopher Walken Martin Sheen Jennifer Garner
Case	?
RPI	Rental	Music	John Williams

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) English dts 5.1 (768Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English French German Bulgarian Arabic English Titling French Titling German Titling	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Steven Spielberg has certainly come up with a variety of topics for his films of late. We recently had the sci-fi chase thriller Minority Report with Tom Cruise and now we get another chase style drama set in the 1960s, with another Tom, this time of the Hanks variety. Catch Me If You Can is inspired by the true story of Frank Abagnale Jr, who at the tender age of 16 ran away from school and proceeded to impersonated a pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer and become a dab hand at forging cheques and making millions in the process.

    In seeking a suitable young actor to play the part of a worldly confident trickster, Spielberg settled on everybody's favourite teenager Leonardo DiCaprio. I'm not a great fan of the young fella, but it was an inspired choice as he actually pulls the role off quite well, alternating effortlessly between super-cool confidence man and lonely, unsure and floundering teenager.

    In the early 1960s, young Frank Abagnale Jr is being taught the ways of the world by his businessman father Frank Snr (Christopher Walken). Young Frank learns that his father's business is struggling, the IRS are clambering for cash, and his mother is having a dalliance with an old friend. It is this latter event that triggers the break-up of his parents' marriage and when faced with a choice of which parent to live with, young Frank decides to make a run for it, literally - heading for New York City. But nobody is interested in helping a kid, so Frank hits on the brilliant idea of impersonating one of the most respected occupations of the day, a Pan-Am pilot. Easily obtaining a uniform, ID, and an understanding of the workings of the airline, Frank then forges some pay cheques which are cashed instantly. The money starts to flow and so do the good times, complete with experiences with women. But, he's attracted the attention of the FBI fraud squad, and in particular a humourless agent who specialises in bank fraud (the lack of humour must come from the bank bit...I know - I previously worked for one). Agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks) and his cohorts get hot on the trail, tracking down Frank to New York. Of course, he is no longer there, has moved cities, and has assumed another occupation, equally as daring as the first. The chase is on.

    The thrill of the chase and the means by which Frank sets about impersonating people is the best part of this film. The means he uses to get hold of the Pan-Am logo in an era before it would have been possible simply to download it from their website (if they still existed - they went belly-up in 1991) is classic.

    One of the criticisms I would make of this film is the running time. It takes the good part of thirty minutes to really get running, and then it drags on for probably fifteen minutes longer than it should. The story wasn't all that complicated and I was impatient to get the chase started without all the family exposition at the start. Maybe it was just me - I've alway been impatient - I worked in a bank, remember.

Video

    This is one of the more unusual looking films I have seen for some time. It is slightly soft and at times incredibly bright. Director of photography Janusz Kaminski has used some interesting techniques with direct lighting coming from what appears to be a mix of natural and artificial sources to create some intensely high-contrast scenes. Characters will sometimes be lit by standing in a direct beam of streaming sunlight that almost flares directly into the lens of the camera. This quite bright appearance causes a fair bit of background grain to be present.

    The transfer is presented in aspect ratio of 1.78:1, which is similar to the original theatrical ratio of 1.85:1. It is 16x9 enhanced.

    This isn't the sharpest image I have ever seen, but this can solely be attributed to the source material. There is only a tiny little bit of bothersome edge enhancement. Shadow detail is fine, but light grain is pretty consistent throughout the whole film. There is no low level noise. Colours are also quite interesting. They are not as vivid or vibrant as I would have imagined a film set in the psychedelic 60s to be, though they are hardly what I would call drab either - just uneventful is perhaps the best way to describe them. There are no apparent problems with bleeding or oversaturation.

    There are no MPEG artefacts. Aliasing is virtually nil and the small number of film artefacts present are miniscule enough to not be bothersome.

    There's half a dozen subtitle tracks. I watched the latter half of the film with the English variety turned on and found them adequate. One point I will note is the usual unfortunate use of the subtitle stream for the film titling captions. There are plenty used throughout this film to indicate year and place, and the boring blocky font used is really quite confronting. In the closing sequence which chronicles what happened to all the characters, the titling captions interfere with the normal subtitles, meaning the sentences are mixed together. This is surely a compelling reason to come up with differing fonts for titling and normal dialogue.

    This is a dual layered disc that is RSDL formatted. The layer change occurs mid scene, during a phone conversation between Hanratty and Abagnale. It is located at 63:06 and is very well handled, being almost invisible.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There are four soundtracks on this disc. English, German, and French Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks are joined by a dts 5.1 soundtrack. The latter was my soundtrack of choice. Overall, this is a rather good soundtrack with heaps of front channel separation. The Dolby Digital and dts tracks offer little difference, perhaps a little tighter overall for the dts, but really either will do the job required with ease.

    Dialogue is magnificent and is beautifully clear and prominent in the overall soundtrack.

    Steven Spielberg has again teamed with the legendary John Williams who provides a classic 60s era score. It's quite quirky, fun and quite pacy at times. I enjoyed it immensely. The songs are sourced from the 60s, such as Frank Sinatra's Come Fly With Me, Dusty Springfield's Look Of Love, and The Kinks You Really Got Me. It even has The Girl From Ipanema and the James Bond Theme.

    There isn't a whole swag of surround use present. Sure, they are used on occasion, and when they are utilized they provide decent fill in, particularly in the airport scenes such as 28:53-29:00, 99:33 and 101:39.

    The subwoofer is used for the odd bump and thump, mostly when the aircraft are landing and the like. It is seamlessly integrated.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    We've listed the three items below as extras, but this is really a completely bare-bones effort.

Main Menu Introduction

Menu Animation & Audio

Scene Selection Animation & Audio

    This is another unfair comparison, with the Region 4 rental disc up against the two-disc set collector's edition in Region 1, but for the sake of completeness:

    The Region 4 disc misses out on:

• "Catch Me if You Can": Behind the Camera
• Cast Me if You Can: The Casting of the Film
• Scoring "Catch Me if You Can"
• Frank Abagnale: Between Reality and Fiction
• The FBI Perspective
• "Catch Me if You Can": In Closing
• Photo galleries
• Cast and Crew Bios
• Production notes

    The Region 1 Collector's Edition misses out on:

• German Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack.

    Certainly, the Region 1 disc is the current clear winner here, however, we'll wait for the Region 4 sell-through disc before we can make a proper comparison.

    Catch Me If You Can is harmless entertainment. It won't make the list of top five Spielberg films of all time, but it is well made, well scripted, and the acting is first class. Even poor old Leonardo handles the confident young fraudster with aplomb. I enjoyed it, even though I thought it perhaps ran just a little too long for the complexity of the story presented.

    The video transfer is unusual. Dominated by plenty of direct lighting and high contrast, it does suffer from light grain through much of the film.

    The audio is solid and tight, with deep warm tones, a funky score and some great renditions of 60s classic songs.

    There are no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall