Mesrine - Parts 1&2: a review

Mesrine is a 2-part film telling, over 4 stylish French hours, the story of real-life French gangster Jacques Mesrine. Mesrine's criminal career through the 1960's and 70's made him somewhat of a celebrity criminal of that kind that seems to have been consigned to history.

Here, he's played memorably by Vincent Cassel, present for pretty much the entire film and holding the screen superbly. Frankly he holds the whole thing together, because it's a bit of a rickety structure this one. The problem is that the film doesn't really make any concerted effort to get under Mesrine's skin, to uncover any depth to his character. There could've been more made of a possibly difficult relationship with his father, and surely he would have been affected in some way by what he saw and did serving for the French army in Algeria – shown in opening scenes that some of the most harrowing and difficult in the whole film. But there's nothing by way of more substantial explanation of Mesrine or his actions.

The truth may well be that there is no greater explanation. There doesn't seem to have been any political ideology influencing Mesrine – he does wind up involved with a couple of political groups but more out of convenience than anything. There is a formative notion of a campaign against the prison system in France, but crucially this seems to be driven more by Mesrine's feeling that it wronged him personally, rather than because it was wrong generally, and there is the key. Mesrine comes across as being driven entirely by ego and vanity, loving his celebrity status. The only times he does anything for reasons other than money, it's because he has been personally wronged, either by the prisons or, in an unsavoury incident that seems to represent a tipping point in his relationship with the public and police, by a journalist who attacks him in an article.

You get the feeling that director Jean-Francois Richet and writer Abdel Raouf Dafri probably realised from the start that there wasn't really much to tell on that score, and so made a conscious decision not to go down that route at all. The problem is that what we are left with, then, is the story of Mesrine's actions. These basically fall into the categories of robbing banks, kidnapping millionaires, shoot-outs with cops, getting arrested, breaking out of prison and seducing women. Repeat ad infinitum. None of these elements are a problem, it's just that 4 hours of them ends up feeling a bit repetitive. The film, being basically a series of vignettes about his various antics, is annoyingly episodic and secondary characters – various accomplices and women – appear and disappear without introduction or explanation

The other big problem I had with this is that I'm left unsure about what we're supposed to make of Mesrine. Cassel satisfyingly avoids the cliché of the charming psycho who is all friendly smiles one minute and ice cold rages the next, and carries a winning insouciance into most scenes, talking his way into this and out of that and happily playing shamelessly to the gallery. But shorn of the danger that he could have got from a more stock psycho character, what are we left with? If we're not meant to fear him in that way, are we meant to see him as a lovable anti-hero? I assume that might be what was being aimed for, but it's missed - through no fault of Cassel's, mind, but because the character is left so annoyingly out of reach.

Cassel, indeed, is excellent and needs to be. He carries the character from callow youth in the French army to balding, wig-wearing, plump middle-age, with his magnificent nose (worthy of a separate billing) and electric stare ever-present. Matching him in the stare department comes support from Mathieu Amalric in the second part, though he doesn't get to do much except that thing with his eyes, and Gerard Depardieu is deliciously unexpected as a Godfather-type figure in the first part. The rest of the cast, yeah they're all grand but honestly there's such a revolving door of characters that it's hard for any of them to make an impression.

I'm being pretty hard on the film here, but the thing is it is still very good, and I want to be hard on it because it could have been great. Aside from Cassel's central performance, it looks wonderfully stylish – a French film set in the 60's and 70's, how could it not? - and the action scenes are well-filmed and exciting even if they do end up getting repetitive due to the number of them that happen in similar circumstances. There's only so much you can do with cops and robbers shooting at each other and chasing each other in cars, and though there's nothing here to match, say, Heat, it's very competently done and suitably visceral. There's some subtly clever camera tricky now and again, with a split screen here and a camera spinning 360 degrees on an axis there, and it never feels obtrusive or flashy.

I have a feeling I want to like this more than I actually do, and more than it merits. It's bitty, episodic, too vaguely structured and characterised, lacking in real substance.....it probably glamourises the life and actions of a man who shouldn't be glamourised.....I don't know. It's been likened to films like Scarface, but that ended up working as a commentary on the American Dream and on the 80's, this just doesn't function on any other level than the surface of the story.

Watch it for Cassel. Watch it for an entertaining crime drama with little of the stylised excesses of it's American forebears, and try to ignore it's real life origins. Watch it in two parts.