Vincent Cassel, who's in his 40s, is France's leading hard-boiled actor. Have you seen "The Crimson Rivers," "Read My Lips," "Irreversible" or "Eastern Promises"? As Mesrine, he affects the sideburns and mustache of a bad guy who studies himself in the mirror and doesn't know his look isn't working. He makes Mesrine self-absorbed, arrogant and detached from the meaning of his murders. He depends on the charisma of his evil to attract women, and it does — although it didn't work for his first wife, the mother of his two children. Well, he wasn't very famous then. Unlike some American stars, Cassel makes no attempt to protect his image. Gaspar Noe's "Irreversible," in particular, would be unthinkable for most of them. In my review, I described that film's story as "so violent and cruel that most people will find it unwatchable."
Don't get the wrong idea. Cassel isn't his characters. He also plays nice guys and did the voice of the French hoodlum in "Shrek." Here he even seems a sympathetic underdog until you reflect he has chosen the role for himself and murdered innocent people along his road to romance. He had an ordinary enough start in life, but then was attracted to the petty criminals who infest the Paris district called Clignacourt — that's where the tourists go to shop in les puces, the flea market. By then, his father believed, he had already been morally destroyed by his experiences in Algeria.
Yes, but some people become addicted to being bad. If you're trained as a paratrooper, you don't routinely seek work as a torturer and executioner. Mesrine seems to have had little concept of others; life for him perhaps contained no more emotion than a point-and-shoot video game. Director Jean-Francois Richet, who made Ethan Hawke-Laurence Fishburne's "Assault on Precinct 13" (2005), treats him as an insect more than a psychological case study.
The acting is macho understatement. Mesrine is a character who might have been played years ago by Gerard Depardieu, who appears here as Guido, a bullet-headed impresario of larceny. The two are business partners, not friends, and there's the suggestion none of his underworld pals understand the depth of Mesrine's pathology. They know they're bad guys, but Jacques takes it to another level.
For information on Jacques Mesrine, this review draws on an article by John Lichfield in the Independent.
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