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Created Sep 05, 2010 02:01AM PST • Edited Mar 02, 2013 02:02PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Very Good 3.5

   France et le Québec endured Jacques Mesrine’s spectacular 1960s and 70s criminal career, anointing him a media sensation in the process. The first half of this too-big-for-a-single-movie story gets told in Mesrine: Killer Instinct, the concluding chapters in Mesrine: Public Enemy #1.

   A French Public Enemies, Mesrine charts the prolific bank robbing and prison breaking career of a Gallic Dillinger. While his biopic has a swinging contemporary feel, it doesn’t transcend its story, as truly great crime movies – Godfathers and Goodfellas – must.

   As the super crook Mesrine, Vincent Cassel easily carries the movie with a performance Al Pacino would admire. Pairing him with Gérard Depardieu: priceless for lovers of French cinema.

   Stylish, gripping, wry and sexy, Killer Instinct warrants its title even if it doesn’t achieve the legendary status of its anti-hero. Worth taking in? For fans of crime cinema, history and those fascinated by French society, definitely. Screening the second movie? Too much to ask from this American, as I suspect it would be for anyone for whom Mesrine wasn’t already a household name.

   Finally, a word about the subtitles: the translation from the French seems to strip the dialog of its idiomatic richness. I don’t speak the language, so my sense about this might be wrong. Mais je ne crois pas.

4. Acting

   Really Great 4.5

   Vincent Cassel’s Pacino-quality performance as legendary crook Jacques Mesrine is properly mercurial, by turns charming, calculating, callous and carnivorous. What is an anti-hero after all, but a scumbag who gets the movie star treatment. More striking than handsome, Cassel looks like a star from the old Camel cigarette ads, a man’s man ready for action.

   Gérard Depardieu quietly amuses in the Tony Soprano role of criminal heavyweight. Speaking of heavyweight, let’s hope this French treasure doesn’t go the way of Brando or Welles, who he now resembles in obesity.

   Others jumping off the screen in the uniformly excellent cast:

   • Cécile De France as the sexy Bonnie to Mesrine’s Clyde.
   • Gilles Lellouche as Mesrine’s first criminal buddy.
   • Roy Dupuis as his French-Canadian bank robbing and prison breaking buddy.
   • Elena Anaya as his lovely – and brutalized – Spanish wife.

5. Male Stars Really Great 4.5

   Cassel

6. Female Stars Perfect 5.0

   Cécile De France and Elena Anaya

7. Female Costars Very Good 3.5

8. Male Costars Really Great 4.5

10. Film

    Very Good 3.5

    Too showy at the outset, Jean-François Richet’s film nonetheless is finely orchestrated, deftly showing Mesrine’s many sides and presenting his criminal exploits with grand élan.

11. Direction Very Good 3.5

12. Play Very Good 3.5

13. Music Very Good 3.5

14. Visuals Great 4.0

    The Monument Valley scene is especially well filmed, zooming in on the top of one of the buttes before tracking down to the escaping criminals.

15. Content

16. Edge

    Horrid 3.6

    Not for the faint of heart: Mesrine and his confreres brutalized women, foreigners and hapless law enforcement officers. Ugly stuff.

17. Sex Erotic 2.6

18. Violence Savage 3.7

    Gird yourself for a cover-your-eyes scene when Mesrine cuts up a bad guy. The fact that the victim was also a scum bag doesn’t make it any easier to watch.

19. Rudeness Vile 4.6

21. Reality

    Glib 1.2

    Chasing down outlaws in Monument Valley makes for classic cinema, though Wikipedia has it that Mesrine was arrested in the less cinematic locale of Arkansas. Even at that, the movie labels Monument Valley as Arizona when it’s actually in Utah. Double whoops.

    More seriously, the opening scene depicts Mesrine’s military service during the Algerian War, in which he purports being ordered to kill an innocent prisoner. Savage.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.5

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0