After a summer of entertaining yet mostly unspectacular films, you might be asking yourself, “Is there anything truly unique in theatres?” Well, count your lucky stars, for the “Mesrine” films hit big-city art theatres last weekend, and will likely keep spreading nationwide.
What are the “Mesrine” films, you ask? They are two, two-hour-plus movies – entitled “Mesrine: Killer Instinct” and “Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1” – which combine to tell the story of Jacques Mesrine, a real-life French bank robber who became the most notorious criminal in that nation’s modern history. Basically, picture “Scarface” if Tony Montana spoke French and robbed banks instead of dealing coke, because star Vincent Cassel’s astonishing performance as the Gallic gangster conjures up memories of the best moments in both Al Pacino’s and Robert DeNiro’s wildest moments.
—–
“Killer Instinct” is the first film of the pair, though so much high-speed insanity unfolds on the screen in each film that you can probably understand the second film on its own, without having seen the first one. It’s kind of like when I took my dad to “Dances with Wolves” and he slept through the entire middle hour of that three-hour opus, and still managed to wake up and understand it all. Indians good, white man bad and needs to change, lots of buffaloes. He got it. And viewers can easily get this story too, because it’s so visceral.
In these movies, there’s a bank robbery, car chase, beating or shootout literally every ten minutes – heck, maybe even every seven. This at least guarantees that you won’t fall asleep due to having to read subtitles, but then again – the subtitles are easy to read, since every third word in some scenes is some variation of the seven dirty words you can’t say on television. Heck, you might even learn new ways to swear and insult people.
The “Mesrine” films cut right to the chase, no pun intended – because “Killer” kicks off with French police wasting our antihero after surprising him in traffic while driving. The story then whiplashes back more than 20 years, to when Mesrine was a cold-blooded interrogator for the French Foreign Legion before he suddenly goes rogue without explanation. From there, it’s a mix of action that’s jaw-dropping because it’s so well-staged, fast-paced and effective, alternating with emotional scenes – like Mesrine sneaking into a hospital disguised as a doctor to visit his dad on his deathbed, or fighting tears while speaking with his daughter as she visits him in prison after 15 years without contact.
These are not movies for the easily offended or squeamish. The guy literally defines the concept of anti-hero, because the filmmakers want viewers to root for him much of the time, yet also aren’t afraid to show the guy shoving a gun in his wife’s mouth during a fight or stripping the clothes off a journalist and beating him to death for writing a critical article about him (thus giving me a new nightmare to worry about.)
But if you don’t mind pedal to the metal pacing, terrific performances, moral complexity and have a strong stomach, the “Mesrine” films are a terrific one-two punch that is hard to forget. It’s rare that American theatres show such challenging fare, so catch it if you can stand it.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.