Mesrine: Killer Instinct
Mesrine: Public Enemy #1
Directed by Jean-Francois Richet
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A year later, Public Enemies doesn’t stack up. Watching it on DVD last weekend, I was disappointed all over again by how little it actually delivers in terms of human drama or cultural insight. Director Michael Mann proved he could supply both of these in a true story like The Insider (1999) or a biopic like Ali (2001), but the Dillinger movie was so choked with action, vintage clothes, and gleaming 1930s automobiles that it seldom paused to consider its protagonist as anything more than an icon. It seems especially inadequate now that I’ve seen the French gangster saga Mesrine, which chronicles the 20-year career of real-life killer, kidnapper, and bankrobber Jacques Mesrine. Released in 2008 as two features, running about four hours total (100 minutes more than Mann had at his disposal), it yields some unpleasant truths about Mesrine’s misshapen character and wild times.
With credits that include Heat, Miami Vice, and The Last of the Mohicans, Mann is revered as a master of the action movie, and Public Enemies is jammed with exciting set pieces: the opening sequence, in which Dillinger tries to free his criminal mentor, Walter Dietrich, from the Indiana State Prison, tells you immediately that you’re in the hands of a filmmaker who knows how construct a chain of events onscreen and, even more important, understands that action is character. All of which makes Mesrine even more impressive by comparison. Director Jean-Francois Richet, who first came to notice with the 1996 thriller Ma 6-T Va Crack-er, may not have the sort of stylistic signature Mann brings to his movies after 30 years in the business. But both Killer Instinct and Public Enemy #1 are filled with daring bank jobs and heart-stopping escape sequences; they hurtle along at a pace that rivals the Dillinger movie while still managing to pick up enough emotional and cultural detail to feel novelistic.
For Mesrine, love and crime merge sublimely when he hooks up with the cool and ruthless Jeanne Schneider (Cecile De France) in Killer Instinct. Richet first shows them flirting in a swank bar: Mesrine makes a lame joke about Tarzan and Jane and Schneider counters with a feminist offer to buy him a drink. “I think in a place like this it’s the men who treat the women,” he replies. “That needs to change,” she says. From there Richet cuts to a nearby casino where Mesrine and Schneider burst in, armed with rifles, and proceed to take the place down. In one electrifying moment, he manages to pinpoint not only the lovers’ mutual passion but their changing times, even as he delivers what we all crave most in a gangster movie: a blaze of glory.
