9 / 10
Official trailer
Mesrine is Jean-François Richet’s 2008 two-part French gangster epic depicting the criminal career of Jacques Mesrine, the French criminal who became one of the country’s most-pursued fugitives across the 1960s and 1970s. Vincent Cassel plays Mesrine across both films. Killer Instinct, the first film, depicts his early criminal career and Canadian operations. Public Enemy Number One, the second film, depicts his French celebrity-criminal period before his death by police ambush in 1979. Abdel Raouf Dafri and Richet wrote the screenplays, adapting them from Mesrine’s 1977 prison autobiography.
La Petite Reine produced the films, and they were released in France in October and November 2008.
Mesrine grabbed me by the collar and didn’t let go for four hours. Cassel is ferocious, charming and frightening, sometimes in the same scene, and I never once felt the film asking me to cheer for him. That’s the balance I want from a gangster picture and almost never get. If I have a complaint, it’s that the second film’s celebrity circus runs a little long.
The combined film works as a crime biopic and as a study of a criminal who builds his own myth. It refuses the heroic outlaw tone that French and American crime films usually reach for. Mesrine is charismatic but unstable, capable but cruel, politically engaged but finally more devoted to his own legend than to any cause. Richet uses two films and about four hours to build that argument, and I think the result belongs near the top of French gangster cinema.
The Cassel Performance
Vincent Cassel’s performance as Jacques Mesrine is among the great central performances in French cinema.
The character requires the actor to portray approximately twenty years of biographical development across two films. Cassel gains and loses real weight across the production. The physical transformation maps onto the character’s accumulated experiences and the period’s changing fashion. The actor commits to the physical work that the role requires across the extended production schedule.
The performance also has to show Mesrine’s charisma without endorsing or condemning him.
Cassel plays it as something other characters fall for, and he never turns it on the audience. We watch people find Mesrine convincing without the film asking us to agree. I think that’s the hardest trick in the whole project, and Cassel pulls it off so completely that I spent four hours gripped by a man I’d cross the street to avoid.
For Writers
Character work can present gripping individuals without requiring audience endorsement. Mesrine’s Cassel performance depicts the character’s charisma as observed phenomenon instead of as seduction of the audience. This applies to fiction. Consider whether your charismatic characters require audience endorsement or are observed phenomena. The observed-phenomenon approach allows broader engagement with complex characters whose actions the work doesn’t endorse. The endorsement approach limits the work’s capacity to engage critically with the character.
The Two-Film Structure
The work’s two-film structure allows serious development of Mesrine’s biographical arc that single-film treatment couldn’t have accommodated. The first film establishes the character’s early criminal development across France, Canadian operations, and Quebec radical political engagement.
The second film depicts the character’s French celebrity period across multiple escapes, robberies, and media manipulation. The two-film structure allows each phase to receive adequate runtime development instead of requiring compression that would damage the wider argument.
The structure also lets the two films feel different.
The first plays as a more conventional gangster picture, and the second turns into a showier celebrity-criminal story. That shift tracks Mesrine’s transformation across his career. I like the first film’s grit better, and I’d have trimmed some of the second film’s escapades, but I understand why Richet needed room to show the myth swallowing the man.
For Writers
Multi-work structures can support biographical or extended dramatic material that single-work treatment would compromise. Mesrine uses two films to develop biographical arc that single-film treatment couldn’t have accommodated. This applies to fiction with biographical or extended dramatic ambition. Consider whether your work benefits from single-work structure or from multi-work structure. Multi-work structure requires careful preparation but allows depth that compressed single-work treatment can’t match. The structural choice should be made based on the material’s actual demands instead of on production convenience.
The Media Engagement
The second film engages considerably with Mesrine’s particular manipulation of French media coverage of his criminal career. The character understood that media celebrity provided protection that traditional criminal anonymity couldn’t deliver. The depicted media engagement works as both character work and as broader argument about how late-twentieth-century media systems amplify instead of expose criminal celebrity. The work’s broader argument about the relationship between media coverage and criminal celebrity emerges from depicted particular situations instead of from stated commentary.
The media engagement also produces distinct dramatic tension. Mesrine’s celebrity provides protection that limits police response.
The same celebrity provides identification that limits Mesrine’s operational flexibility. The character’s manipulation of media coverage becomes increasingly elaborate as the celebrity grows. The eventual police ambush that ends his career was made possible partially by the predictability that his celebrity required. The structural design uses the media engagement to develop both character and broader argument.
This is the material I find most chilling. Mesrine figures out that fame protects him, the press is happy to amplify him, and by the end the celebrity he built helps get him killed. The film never lectures about any of it, and I think that restraint is why it hits so hard.
For Writers
Specific cultural or media engagement can develop both character and broader argument. Mesrine uses depicted media manipulation to develop both Mesrine’s character and broader arguments about media systems. This applies to fiction. Consider whether your work’s distinct cultural engagement supports both character development and argumentative content. The strongest cultural engagement works at multiple levels instead of serving single dramatic functions.
Craft Note
Richet’s structural decision to produce the work as two films required serious planning that single-film production wouldn’t have demanded. The director and producers needed to maintain budget across the extended production. The actors needed to commit to schedule across the extended period. The production design needed to maintain consistency across two films released sequentially. The cinematography needed to develop both consistent visual tone and particular tonal differentiation between the two films. The completed work works because the production approach supported the structural ambition.
The lesson applies to creative work broadly. Multi-work projects require production planning proportional to the structural ambition. Reactive production can’t sustain multi-work projects that exceed conventional single-work scope.
Is Mesrine as good as people say?
A 9, and Cassel is the main reason.
He makes Mesrine magnetic without ever letting the film fall in love with him, and the two-part structure gives the story room to show a criminal turning himself into a legend. I’d knock off a point for the second film’s longer stretches of celebrity business and nothing more. Watch both parts together as one film, and don’t skip the first because the second sounds more exciting.
