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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT
(PART 1) Jacques Mesrine isn’t as well known in the United States as he is in his native France, where he’s purportedly its most notorious criminal icon of the past 50 years. His status there still provokes mixed emotions some 30 years after his violent death in 1979. This two-part biopic shot back-to-back, a la Soderbergh’s Che, gives the man his time in the cinematic limelight and his story some room to breathe. Well, some, anyway. Jacques Mesrine—played by the charismatic, devilish, twisted, and sometimes sympathetic Vincent Cassel—is an outsider by choice. He doesn’t quite fit in, not when he’s a soldier in Algiers and refuses to shoot a woman as ordered, nor when he returns home and finds a respectable job. Turning his back on his middle-class parents, he becomes a gangster, with a harder edge than most of the thugs around him. He gains some respect—and also some jail time. He also finds a woman he is crazy about, has three kids with her, and then neglects and abuses her to the point of her finally leaving him for good. But the film doesn’t stop there. We see how Mesrine, gaining notoriety through a series of robberies and other criminal enterprises, grabs the attention of not just of the authorities but other criminals who want to take him out. He flees to Montreal with the Bonnie to his Clyde, Jeanne Schneider (Cécile De France), who is just as much, if not more so, gun crazy as he. There he starts his criminal anew, joining forces with a Quebec separatist to rob casinos and other assorted scams until the three kidnap an executive, which sends both men to a maximum security prison. It’s here that the rest of the narrative takes place. Up until this point, Mesrine has been an arrogant ass to his family and most of those around him, including his former friend/crime-boss Guido, played by Gérard Depardieu, but during his incarceration, he’s beaten and broken down, causing him to plot his prison escape. This final act (roughly a quarter of the running time) is a staggering work of action and intense suspense as we wonder how he’ll break out. Jean-François Richet, who directed the Hollywood remake of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, knows how to stage gun battles. Not to mention letting Cassel, from start to finish, steal any scene he’s in. Where the film is flawed is in some of its pacing. We get all of the main points that are needed to follow the story—how Mesrine, as a soldier (somewhat) damaged from his service in Algeria, starts out at the bottom and rises up in the underworld, while his troubled marriage to the beautiful Spanish Sofia unravels. Elena Anaya has a few excellent scenes to show her transformation from adoring wife to spiteful mother, but a lot of the story lines seem rushed, going from point A to point C with only a moment for point B, especially in Mesrine’s relationship with Sofia. There are other omissions that seem more glaring, such as how quickly Mesrine starts up a romantic life of crime with Jeanne. For a two-part, four-hour plus double feature, it’s strange how some of it feels edited down from a mini-series. Perhaps this is part of
the point, how fast Mesrine moves until he winds up in prison, where the film feels most harrowing and all around well
crafted and acted. Some scenes are directed with the kind of flair and
hair-raising excitement that make Killer Instinct seem like one of the
year’s best. Though it’s not entirely consistent, overall it makes
for some fascinating viewing and history, with a compelling performance
at its center. Jack Gattanella
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