John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson — Hollywood has long had a love affair with real-life gangsters. A few decades ago, there was a crime boss in France who made that kind of impression: Jacques Mesrine, coldblooded, hot-tempered, unashamedly brutal and the wielder of a killer smile. And in the biopic Mesrine: Killer Instinct, he gives his better-known American rivals a run for their cinematic money.
Adapted from a memoir that Mesrine wrote in prison, the film takes him from shooting unarmed rebels in Algiers to robbing banks and kidnapping a wealthy employer in Canada to breaking out of — and then back into — a supposedly escape-proof prison.
The filmmakers never even remotely try to make him appealing. But they sure make him seductive. At one point, they have him dancing with a woman who’ll soon be his wife — sexy, slow — and somehow he’s also dancing with the camera. As she melts in his arms, the audience gets caught up in the embrace. Then our antihero returns to his whore, slaughters a pimp and buries a guy alive, and you’re left thinking, “Oh, yeah, there’s that side of him.”
Jacques Mesrine is played by Vincent Cassell, a tall, lanky French star (you’ve seen him in the Ocean’s 11 films, if nowhere else) whose intensity is a lot like that of the young Gerard Depardieu. That comparison occurs to me because Depardieu is in the picture, playing a gentlemanly older thug who takes Mesrine under his wing and tries to show him how to keep violence and his domestic life separate. Long story short: It doesn’t work. The violence escalates even as Mesrine becomes a father, and escalates even more when he meets a prostitute who says she’s up for anything, and becomes a Bonnie to his Clyde.
The real Mesrine was known as a man of a thousand faces, and the film — or rather films, the second of which arrives in theaters in September — cover the whole of his criminal career. Director Jean-Francois Richet filmed both installments in one long epic shoot, across nine months and several continents. And though there was some talk about condensing the two parts into a single film for American audiences, wiser heads have prevailed.