Catch me if you can

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * )

It might seem like a big-star sort of affair - FBI guy Hanks chasing con man DiCaprio around 60s America with Spielberg behind the camera. But for all its heavyweights, Catch Me If You Can doesn't feel like an event sort of film: just a likeable if slightly ponderous caper-drama.

It's one the director could knock off between blockbusters, maybe because he liked the story and its themes - this isn't the first film he's made about kids surviving when their parents split or disappear, as happened to him.

It's based on the real-life adventures of Frank Abagnale Jr, who passed himself off as a Pan Am airline pilot, doctor, and assistant district attorney while becoming an expert in the art of cheque fraud in the days before computer indentification.

If there's one place it gets bogged down, it's in its fascination with Abagnale's various counterfeit techniques. That's only so interesting to an audience who have basically paid by eft-pos to see Leonardo dress in some cool 60s threads.

The other reason for this endurance test is that it attempts to evenly balance the chase powered by Hanks' bookish Agent Hanratty, whose G-man more resembles the Man from the Prudential, and the family drama in which Frank Jr is trying in his own confused, criminal way to make up for his father's financial failings.

As Frank Sr, Walken is terrific - don't be suprised if he gets a supporting actor Oscar nod from this and we finally get to see him dancing in something other than a Fatboy Slim video. He's a Loman-esque character who isn't above pulling off his own sleight-of-hand to get what he wants.

His life crumbles when, after being hounded by Internal Revenue, he is divorced by the French wife he met while helping liberate Europe. His teenage son runs away from home and, with an ingeniousness which in another generation might have made him an expert computer hacker, starts a cheque-cashing scheme which nets him more than a million bucks as he too bounces around America.

It does come with the best 60s production design that money can buy and DiCaprio makes a decent enough job of portraying a sort of talented Mr Ripley minus the psychopathic streak whose loneliness is mirrored by the FBI guy he keeps giving the slip.

But it's too long - even the projectionist at my Queen St session seemed to think it was a bit long when the movie stopped briefly on the last reel. And for a movie about the art of deceit - and self-deception - it's a handsome, entertaining affair that lacks the energy to fully put one over on us.

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken

Director: Steven Spielberg

Rating: M (low level offensive language)

Running time: 140 mins

Screening: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas