Straddling as it does the realm of the bad-boy gangster film, which could be seen as ranging from Brian De Palma's "Scarface" to Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" series, the French film "Mesrine: Killer Instinct" is closer to the former in theme while sitting somewhere in the middle of both when it comes to style.

Which is a long-winded way to say that you may not end up learning anything meaningful about what made France's most notorious gangster tick, but you may not really care. Director Jean-Francois Richet has constructed a hell of a joy ride. In that sense, "Mesrine: Killer Instinct" -- which is the first half of a four-hour overall film -- may be closer to "Thelma & Louise," complete with the "Easy Rider" ending.

Richet begins with the ending, the 1979 ambush sprung on Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) and his moll of the moment, Sylvia (Ludivine Sagnier) in the middle of Paris traffic. From there he takes us back to Mesrine's army exploits in Algeria, where he was a torturer and killer, to his growth from petty hooddom in early 1960s France.

In the first film, at least, we see his rise to bank robber, prison escapee (after an extended sequence in which he himself is tortured), would-be political activist, avid womanizer and all-around sociopath. Throughout, Cassel struts and frets his way like a 5-year-old on Ritalin pulling the wings off flies -- if the flies were other humans.

Anyone could ask, at this point, whether there's a larger point to be made here. It's not as if Richet, working from a script by Abdel Raouf Dafri (partially from Mesrine's own roman a clef, "L'instinct de Mort"), delves deeply into Mesrine's psyche. But that would miss the point. The larger question to ask is why are we, as a movie audience, so drawn to such characters? Because the list of movie bad guys is long and varied.

Whatever the answer, "Mesrine: Killer Instinct" sits there, intriguing, depressing, beguiling, frustrating but almost always exhilirating in its depictions of a man drawn to violence and ultimate self-destruction the way most the rest of us are to the very air we breathe.

Below: A photo montage of the real Jacques Mesrine.