Highly Overrated But Still Good

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

I ended the review of "Death Instinct" with the following statement: "Mesrine cared enough to leave a legacy that he wrote it himself. That a film was adapted from it says it all, and that one movie wasn't enough to cover everything says even more".Now, I realized that even two movies couldn't actually do 'justice' to the self-proclaimed anarchist who constantly defied it. And I couldn't possibly write a review before reading the autobiography he wrote during his period at La Santé jail… for once that he wasn't busy masterminding an escape.With manly gusto, Cassel rendered most identifiable traits of Mesrine but the book made them understandable from a skeptical perspective. Some say "no honor among thieves". But even the cops acknowledged that Mesrine was a man of his word. The film opens with a negotiation with his rival Broussard. Mesrine is cornered and has a girl in the house and no chance to escape, but even in defeat, he stays in command.He gives his word not to open fire in exchange of twenty minutes; Broussard knows Mesrine will burn some incriminating papers, but anything to avoid the bloodshed. He earns Mesrine's respect, and even more when he accepts to come unarmed as a way to earn the arrest. Mesrine welcomes him with champagne and cigars. After all, if you're going to be arrested, why not do it with some style? It says something crucial about the man; he valued relationships more than money or freedom. Didn't he get back to the Canadian penitentiary he had just escaped from i Canada, because he promised to get his friends out?Mesrine makes no secret that he's a criminal, that he always wanted the easy way (that wasn't that easy), that he regarded working men as castrated slaves who resigned to a life of mediocrity unchained to the alarm-clock. You can't read the first pages without getting some "Goodfellas" vibes, but the kinship between Mesrine and Henry Hill's stops when you realize it isn't just a choice of lifestyle but a case of determinism guided by a sense of social revolt à la Camus' "Stranger". The greatest enemy of Mesrine isn't the police but the petty representatives of a system that "good" people respect out of cowardice rather than free will.And Mesrine hasn't enough tough words to denounce the prisons: instead of giving inmates chances for rehabilitation, they only break their spirit or turn them to into tougher and ruthless criminals. That's why he always escaped, and the book he wrote preceded the most sensational of all, it's not just about determination but competence, too. The escape from the trial by hiding gun in the toilet was a masterstroke but the book makes it even more impressive because Mesrine planted the gun before his arrest. He anticipated the possibility and planned the escape 'just in case'. Anticipation is the key to success and Mesrine wasn't only brawn, his brain was his biggest asset.Now, don't get the wrong idea, competence and honor don't make him "honorable", still, his ego wouldn't have tolerated any defaming accusation, he was a gangster, a killer, who could kill cops but no civilians, he loved children, animals, braved all the risks to go visit his dying father, he was a master of disguise who couldn't disguise his feelings when it came to love, as he could write passionate and romantic declarations of love to his women. He 'finished' two Canadian rangers by executing them in the head but he felt more remorseful toward that bird he accidentally shot when he was twelve. As regret, he only wished they didn't draw their guns… but they knew the rules, they played, were slower, and lost. Anyway, the way he saw it, he never gratuitously killed.So he knew his value and operated in an endless spiral of bank robberies and parties, only punctuated by short periods of jail. That was his routine, he couldn't stop. At one point, his partner in crime Charlie leaves him because he knows he reached the no-return point. Mesrine moves forward, it's the business he's chosen, he loved the taste of adrenaline and the testosterone-driven life, he says that the day the nation gave him a weapon to fight the Algerians; he couldn't get rid of it. It became a drug. The same year, "The Hurt Locker" was released and it started with the quotation that 'war was a drug'. Mesrine was addicted too, he cherished the risk, he didn't care about his own life as long as he had a chance (he never foolishly risked his neck) but he never feared death, which made him even more dangerous, death was still a better option than jail, and he proved it four times.He knew Karma would finally have the last word. And the ending was the one part he could have never written, but he foreshadowed it. He knew police would never give him a chance in an ambush. They didn't, he was killed without summation, with explosive bullets (prohibited) and the most shocking moment was when a cop coming from another car gave him the same treatment than for the Canadian rangers. Mesrine never believed in the 'blaze of glory' death but I guess if he wrote a book from beyond-the-grave, he wouldn't have been much spiteful toward his executioners, he knew the rules, he played and lost, like the Canadians, fair trade.I don't feel much admiration toward him, but who doesn't want to be a tiger rather than a sheep. I guess that's the power of cinema, to make us live a character's life by proxy, admiring a bad guy the time of a film and then come to your sense. Still, if you read the book, it'll take more time. It doesn't say that there is honor among thieves; just that there are brave people and cowards in every kind of people. And gangsters are people, too.

This two-part film is good in the way it doesn't only show the charisma of Mesrine (which is the main cause of his myth in France I think), but also his extreme violence and how he was just a "rabid dog" taking political causes to satisfy this violence. Still Mesrine remains fascinating by his level of boldness and how he just failed French and Canadian states in dealing with him. This is maybe a part of my punkness which appreciates this boldness but I think this is why people found him charismatic: he was defying institution and was quite efficient doing it. An anthropological insight in the French mind somewhat!

Mesrine was both a Reniassance man and a sociopath. H cooks wonderfully, loves fine wine and good cigars, as well as fancy women. But he is absolutely ruthless. When he creeps into the hospital to see his dying father, you wonder "What went wrong?" Was the father too strict? Not strict enough? Mesrine obviously had a death wish as he courts his death with flair and imagination.He loves the media, and is loved in return. Unlike the complicit media who lied about Pat Tillman's death at the hands of members of his own company and infuriated his family, Mesrine and Paris Match are on the same page. To see how gentle he is with the family he takes hostage, and how he doesn't desert the other crook who has been shot in the leg, shows you that this murderer has many facets to his character.As I looked up the history of the right-wing writer they leave for dead, I was amused to see a video of him from his hospital bed, and he is very handsome, much more so than the bland actor portraying him. Mesrine, au contraire, is much handsomer than the real Mesrine. But , like many movies about famous people, I am left empty wishing there was more substance to the causal factors in his life.Nonetheless, I am buying both to see again.

Public Enemy Number One changes tacts in the 2009 double-bill chronicling notorious French gangster Jacques Mesrine, in that where the first was interested in detailing the rise and rise of the man, with hierarchy dominating the subject matter as well as the creating of his reputation; this edition is focused more on the tale of a gangster situated at the top of his game as well as the top of the state's hate list, hence the title, as an air of inevitability in dramatic decline begins to creep in. Cassel is back as Mesrine and playing him as the man whom ages into this somewhat grotesque, bearded, balding, overweight individual with delusions he's beaten mostly everyone up to this point and thus, is able to do mostly anything he wishes in winning any feud he instigates. The title refers to the name the state tagged onto him as Mesrine evaded capture; incarceration; thieved and terrorised to the point a 'shoot to kill' tactic had to be deployed. Since most of their primary methods were rendered futile due to the man's seeming invulnerability to being held down in a prison, a more blood thirsty tactic was forced into being deployed. As the state appear to step up their tactics and actions, Mesrine comes across as winding down as age and apparent psychological state catch up with him in that ideas of new plateaus such as politics and guerrilla warfare onto which he'll move begin to fill his head.If Killer Instinct was more to do with building a man up, this film is concerned with knocking him down; the first film allowing us to form our own opinion of him as he engaged in all this immoral activity but director Jean-François Richet refraining from painting an overly hateful image of him. When Mesrine appeared to engage in a violent act for the first time in Killer Instinct, it was against a pimp whom had beaten a woman up, rendering said fight against a sleazy; woman hating; sex industry working individual. Here, Richet drops us into an early instigation of violence as we observe Mesrine in a courthouse facing sentencing; but, and after a brief allusion to The Godfather, is soon shooting up police officers and taking a judge hostage as he escapes in what is a sequence of violence solely designed to turn us away from him as he does what he does; this, rather than paint an imbalanced portrait such as previously. Richet gradually veers us away from this figure of Mesrine, deliberately alienating us from him as the end nears, in savage beatings of hapless helpless journalists; the kidnapping and threatening of rich old men in their 80s for ransoms and a particularly gross montage right nearer the end in which Mesrine and fresh squeeze Sylvie Jeanjacquot (Sagnier) indulge in mass spending with ill-gotten money as wallowing in the purchasing of brand new cars and expensive diamonds gradually force us into turning on them.Director Richet paces this alienation wonderfully, only very gradually taking this character away from the audience before the inevitable comes to a hilt. If Killer Instinct was all about telling a story about a criminal flying all over the place and whose tales became dangerously entertaining and engaging as we wanted those around him, on several occasions, to fail in their apprehension; Public Enemy Number One is all about rendering Mesrine oafish and as if nothing more than a middle aged thug with a school playground mentality. When we begin, he's still up to his old tricks in robbing a bank before holding up another across the street for the thrill of it; in hiring a boxer he meets to act as the driver for another escapade, whom is apprehended before the plan can play out, and the consequent getaway which very nearly kills Mesrine and his second accomplice whom himself argues and walks away from Mesrine, we get the feeling the wheels are beginning to come off.Mesrine's chief criminal relationship is with another French criminal named François Besse, played by Mathieu Amalric. Besse is a quiet voice of reason amidst an inaccurate growing sense of invulnerability; the first night they break out of prison sees Mesrine bring over two women for sex and drugs, despite their faces being all over the news; whilst on another occasion, the venturing into a police station in disguise feels like a discerning act too far, and we relate to Besse as his facial expressions; tone and body language begin to mirror our own. Again, a sense of deliberate alienation creeps in on a number of occasions. The relationship hits a hilt when Besse questions Mesrine's mindset and philosophies, and the distinction between a man on a criminal ladder engaging in hierarchical struggle to that of someone veering more and more away from this life is established. Mesrine's admittance to this new existence and new found sense of life pushes him away from what it was he was in the first film, disobeying and betraying the demands of the genre; a rule breaking which costs him. While not as good as the first film detailing Mesrine's exploits, Public Enemy Number One offers an effective change of tact in covering the man's dangerous, brooding, cut and thrust life; culminating in a sequence which carries the lonesome air of inevitability as the packed, bustling Parisian streets act as the setting for the finale. As a matching set of engaging, powerhouse film-making; Richet's Mesrine double bill certainly delivers.