Released weeks apart, these form a two-part biopic of France's most notorious bank robber of recent times, Jacques Mesrine, who rampaged through France and Quebec in the '60s and '70s, escaping captivity time and time again until his eventual summary execution in the midst of Paris traffic by the French police.The story has been filmed before; in a leaden-footed form in 1984, which gave us the basic sequence of events in Mesrine's last act and along the way forgot to include any motivational background or characterisation to explain why an amoral thug would have continued to exert such a Robin Hood-like fascination on French society. Richet's films certainly rectify that, and more: the combination of casting the magnetic Vincent Cassel, switching from avuncular to ruthless in the blink of an eye, and alluding to Mesrine's formative, brutalising experiences in the Algerian war steers dangerously close to adulation of the protagonist as an anti-establishment icon, for all that Richet is careful to include detail of Mesrine's throwaway espousal of any radical cause of the day or incidence of self-centred brutality.
Still, as biopics go, it's tautly punchy and benefits from a sense that what we're seeing is pretty close to the facts, as Mesrine and authorities alike bungle repeatedly in their assigned labours, stripping away the staple gloss of the Hollywood heist film.
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment