Film Review: Reviewed By Trevor Johnston; 4 out of 5

A notorious figure in his native France and beyond, bank robber and prison escapee extraordinaire Jacques Mesrine led such a wildly excessive life that it's taken two films (this and Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One) to pack it all in. The first instalment opens with his still-controversial shooting in 1979, before returning to his formative army years in Algeria, and a subsequent trail of criminality across 1960s France, Spain and even Canada. Gérard Depardieu is on imposing form as an old-school Parisian crime boss, while Cécile de France sparkles as a gun-toting femme fatale, yet it's a truly electric Vincent Cassel who owns this movie as Mesrine himself. Director Jean-François Richet keeps up a cracking pace, deliberately styling the proceedings after Hollywood's gritty crime flicks from the early 1970s. He also purposefully contrasts Mesrine's charismatic contempt for authority with a shockingly brutal ruthlessness. The result goes beyond pastiche to shape a pulsating chronicle of one man's confounding - and deadly - contradictions.

Plot Summary

Biographical crime drama starring Vincent Cassel. The first part of the story of notorious French criminal Jacques Mesrine, from small beginnings as a Paris thug and armed raider, to fugitive bank-robber and jail-breaker, until he was eventually declared to be Canada's Public Enemy Number One.