‘Mesrine: Killer Instinct’ at Magic Lantern
“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 is “Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1”), 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 breaking back into a Quebec jail – two weeks after his own successful escape – to free his comrades.)
Jean-Francois Richet’s 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– he seems tailor-made for the movies.
We meet the 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, 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.