Film review: Mesrine: Killer Instinct

Published on Thursday 6 August 2009 18:58

MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT (15) **** DIRECTED BY: JEAN-FRANÇOIS RICHET STARRING: VINCENT CASSEL, GÉRARD DEPARDIEU, ROY DUPUIS, ELENA DUPYA

THE frustrating thing about assessing French gangster movie Mesrine: Killer Instinct, is that it's really only half a movie. Conceived, Kill Bill-style, as a two-part epic (with a cliff-hanger ending signalling the intermission), it's a bracing, breathlessly paced introduction to the rise of France's most notorious criminal, Jacques Mesrine, but it works best when watched in conjunction with its superior second half, Mesrine: Public Enemy No 1.

That film, which is due for release here in two weeks, deepens Part One's romanticised take on Mesrine's thug life and revealing the film as a whole to be a more complex proposition than the smash-and-grab operation Killer Instinct suggests.

Watched in isolation, this first part almost seems episodic to a fault, with director Jean-Franoise Richet tearing through the flashpoint moments of Mesrine's upwards trajectory via scenes of such surprising brevity you barely have time work out who anyone is, let alone what's happening or why. But while that's initially jarring, the approach, which may have been necessary to get this down to a viable running time, actually makes formalistic sense. As Part One's subtitle suggests, Mesrine is a man who lives by his wits and whose life unfurls at a rapid clip. He's not the kind of guy to endlessly analyse his actions, so why should a film depicting his dizzying entry into the criminal underworld spend excessive time contextualising every detail or poring over every character's back-story?

Viewing Killer Instinct in this way certainly helps overcome the potentially debilitating effect of splitting the film in two – as does Richet's unabashed retro filmmaking style.

Unlike Steven Soderbergh's recent Che, this is not a boundary-pushing film seeking to radically reinterpret the way cinema represents problematic public figures. It's more of a tribute to the crime films of Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma, not to mention the lean, mean pulpy thrills of the 1930s Warner Bros gangster classics.

In other words, it makes no secret of the fact that it wants audiences to have a good time revelling in the movie-like trajectory of Mesrine's life, thus it is better able to withstand having its release tailored for commercial cinematic exhibition.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that in Vincent Cassel, the film has a mesmerising star delivering his most bravura performance to date. Ever since his blistering breakthrough in Mattheiu Kassovitz's urban classic La Haine, Cassel has excelled in playing brutish, mercurial men able to charm and alarm with thrilling unpredictability.

As a character, Mesrine, who was France's (and later Canada's) most wanted man in the 1960s and 1970s, provides him with the perfect showcase for those skills.

Kicking off in 1979 with a nifty piece of split-screen action to which part two will eventually work its way back, Killer Instinct quickly winds the clock back to 1959, dropping us into a heated, pressure cooker scenario in which Mesrine, then a volunteer soldier serving in the French army in Algeria, participates in the brutal interrogation of some Algerian nationalists.

Taking to institutionalised barbarity like a duck to water (and possibly traumatised by the experience), once back in civilian life he quickly finds his government training has provided him with skills easily transferable to a life of crime, which he actively seeks out in reaction to his weak father, whom he despises for lacking the backbone to stand up to the Nazis during the war.

Not that Mesrine is particularly principled. Violent, racist, and borderline fascistic, he's untroubled by morality in the conventional sense, which comes in useful as he makes his way up the food chain of the Parisian underworld under the guidance of local kingpin Guido (a commanding cameo from Gerard Depardieu). Along the way he makes token efforts to go straight by getting married, having kids and, following a stint in the clink for armed robbery, briefly finding contentment as a model-builder for an architecture firm. Skipping through these events in brisk fashion without spending too much time fretting over their significance, the film then pinballs us across the Atlantic to Montreal, where Mesrine falls in with Jean-Paul Mercier, a Quebecois revolutionary with whom he goes on an extensive crime spree, robbing multiple banks and eventually graduating to kidnapping with new girlfriend Jeanne (Ccile de France), who's all too eager to become Bonnie to his Clyde.

With a deliberately overblown score helping propel the action, Richet urgently builds up to his film's show-stopping interlude, which he spins into another wry comment on the way institutionalised barbarity can sometimes fuel criminal resolve.

The film isn't dumb enough to use this as an excuse for Mesrine's actions, but as repugnant as much of Mesrine's behaviour is, there's no denying he and Cassel want us to cheer him on. And that's easy to do.

This, after all, is a film that taps into the fundamental appeal gangsters have always had on film and exploits that appeal for its own ends. That these ends only really become clear when part two flips everything on its head may yet prove annoying to some (especially since it requires shelling out for an additional ticket), but coming at a time when the majority of mainstream Hollywood product barely sustains the interest past the first act, let alone across multiple installments, the fact that Mesrine: Killer Instinct goes off like a rocket and still leaves you gasping for more makes such gripes easy to forgive.