Mesrine: Killer Instinct

City Paper Grade: B-

by Sam Adams

Courtesy of Music Box Films STIFF UPPER LIP: Vincent Cassel plays French outlaw Mesrine with ferocity.

Where have all the bad guys gone? With each new account of some charismatic criminal rampaging through the '60s and '70s, one feels a twinge of nostalgia for the days when outlaws roamed — or at least, you're supposed to.

Killer Instinct, the first half of Jean-François Richet's diptych, follows Frenchman Jacques Mesrine from his days as a torturer of Algerian rebels (where, we presume, he was schooled in the titular virtue) through a series of robberies and murders in Europe, Canada and the U.S. The ferociously charismatic Vincent Cassel plays Mesrine — whose autobiography, smuggled out of a French prison, made him a celebrity at home — as a star in the making, one canny enough to shout "Vive le Québec libre!" at TV cameras as he's taken into custody in Montréal. The movie even provides a flash-forward to his outlaw's death, as a tubby Casell and future belle Ludivine Sagnier are ambushed by a truck full of gun-wielding men. (Stay tuned for part 2, Public Enemy No. 1, coming next week.)

Richet, whose last movie was the superfluous remake of Assault on Precinct 13, knows the vocabulary of '70s crime movies: saturated colors, split screens, self-conscious music cues ("Stand by Your Man" as Mesrine and accomplice Cécile de France flee to Arizona). But he's not bringing anything new to the table. If you've seen Goodfellas, or the superior A Prophet, written by Richet's co-scenarist Abdel Raouf Dafri, you know what's up next, even if you don't know about Mesrine.

Richet and Dafri's best trick is a penchant for radical narrative compression, like a smash cut from a lowlife pitching Mesrine on a bank heist to the latter sitting behind bars. But the movie's main asset, and not an insignificant one, is its performances: not just the feral Cassel, but a bloated Gérard Depardieu as his gangland mentor and wry Roy Dupuis as his Canadian cohort. If as much thought had gone into the movies as the actors put into their roles, we might have had something here.