Picking up where Mesrine: Killer Instinct left off, Public Enemy charts the fall of ruthless, charismatic French gangster Jacques Mesrine, a folk hero from the era that brought us the Baader Meinhof gang. A companion piece that functions equally well as a stand alone movie, Mesrine Part Deux – as they’re sadly not calling it – keeps up the same kinetic, episodic pace as its predecessor.
The film belts through the improbable historical details - Mesrine escapes from custody, he grants an audience to Paris Match, he robs banks, grows a beard, picks up a new dolly bird mistress (Ludivine Sagnier), parts company with accomplice Mathieu Almaric, puts on weight, and consistently grandstands for the public.
Essayed with menacing charm by Vincent Cassell, Mesrine may be a thug and a murderer but, aware that contemporary revolutionary fervour could lend a certain credence to his lawlessness, he knew how to please an anti-bourgeois crowd. “I exploit no one,” he implores. “I don’t like laws and I won’t be slave to my alarm clock.”
Director Jean-François Richet inserts enough corrupt gendarmes and political turmoil to allow his antihero scope to brutalise a journalist without losing the audience. He’s taking the movie’s side not Mesrine’s; gangster films can’t function without moral relativity. Like Mesrine himself notes of his tossed-off written memoirs, “People like pace, action.”
Let’s get this out of the way. The Mesrine project is a magnificent achievement. But the second film just isn’t as satisfying as the first instalment. The tone is darker: the protagonist’s nemesis, Le commissaire Broussard (Olivier Gourmet), casts a doomed shadow across the film. That is how it should be; this is the hubris section, after all. The problem is that Mesrine, though M. Cassell is never less than compelling, cannot sustain four-and-a-half hours of unhinged mayhem. It’s simply too much gangster film for one man.