“Mesrine: Killer Instinct” begins at the end, with a forest of guns and a close- range shooting, and then, barely giving us time to gasp, takes us back where it all began. The film, the first of two parts (part two, “Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1,” which arrives next week, is the couldn’t-make-it-up true story of notorious French gangster Jacques Mesrine, who left an international trail of robberies, kidnappings, gunfire and prison breakouts behind him for two decades before his violent death in 1979.
Played by Vincent Cassel, with a taut expression and a mustache that seems to grow exponentially with his crimes (then again, it was the ’70s), Mesrine emerges as a coolly efficient, enigmatic figure whose loyalty to his fellow criminals was legend. (We see him, in the movie, breaking back into a Quebec jail — two weeks after his own successful breakout — to free his comrades.)
The film is based on his autobiography, which Mesrine wrote in prison in the 1970s and distributed clandestinely. Gifted at thinking on his feet — we watch him smoothly impersonating a cop to a couple who catch him in the act of robbing their home, and they are immediately reassured — he seems tailor-made for the movies.
Jean-François Richet’s film is an engaging one, even if it often plays like a re- enacted, high-episodic documentary. Date and places flit by — “Algeria, 1959,” “Montreal, 1968,” “Arizona, 1969” — as a series of scenes from Mesrine’s eventful life play out, sometimes with abrupt and puzzling gaps in between. (They’re inevitable gaps, to be sure — you can’t capture every event of a man’s life in two two-hour spurts — but nonetheless frustrating.)
We meet his wife (Elena Anaya) and children with whom he could have had a normal life, had he wished it; the gangster Guido (Gerard Depardieu, laconically menacing) who became a mentor and sinister father-figure; the vicious prison guards whose inhumane treatment of Mesrine inspired rebellion.
The cast is first-rate, particularly Cecile de France as Jeanne, the Bonnie to Mesrine’s Clyde (in one late scene, she begs him not to break into the women’s prison to free her, but he doesn’t listen) and Cassel in his eerie stillness. In prison, we see him tortured, sobbing, naked, broken, yet resolute. “I’m not dead,” he says, and you wonder if anyone — or anything — could kill him. Not in this movie, anyway.
“mesrine: killer instinct”
R for strong brutal violence, some sexual content and language. 1 hour and 53 minutes. Starring Vincent Cassel, Cecile De France, Ludivine Sagnier and Gerard Depardieu. Opens today at the Mayan.
