Country: France
Genre: Action
Director: Jean-François Richet
Year: 2008
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
Public Enemy No 1 isn’t quite as compelling as Death Instinct, the film that chronicled the first half of Jacque Mesrine’s two decade criminal career, but that isn’t because the events are any less dramatic. The problem lies more in the directing and screenwriting.
Whereas director Jean-François Richet managed to create a kaleidascopic feel from an expert use of montage, music, sound cues and the like in Death Instinct, he can’t quite repeat the feat in Public Enemy No. 1, so the film feels episodic. Even though there are no shortage of hair raising prison escapes and confrontations with the police in Public Enemy No. 1, the film begins to drag a bit towards the end. Even worse, since Richet has already shown us twice what is going to happen to Mesrine, there is little suspense in the third act.
I think that Richet reasoned that everyone in France already knew how Mesrine ended up, and he wanted to have a circular structure, so that the end of the film would dovetail with the beginning. However, Richet is forgetting something. Even though the viewer might know how the film is going to end, if the director is expert enough, we can be made to experience the events afresh as fiction, so there’s no need to sacrifice suspense. Richet should have stuck to a purely chronological scheme. It would have been much more effective.
But other than that caveat, Public Enemy No. 1 is just as good as the first installment. Vincent Cassel continues to excel as criminal mastermind Jacques Mesrine. The seeming contradictions of his personality in the first movie are resolved here. It turns out that Mesrine has a philosophical basis for his actions. He’s not simply addicted to the quick fix.
The way Mesrine sees things, democracy is a mirage. French society is actually an oligarchy, in other words a government run of, by and for the rich and powerful. Effectively, the average person is a wage slave who works to further enrich the wealthy. Mesrine refuses his role as a slave and attacks the wealthy in the form of robbing banks and kidnapping the wealthy for ransom.
Mesrine justifies the killing of policemen because the cops are the henchmen that enforce the oligarchy. Mesrine is aware that by refusing to be broken by the system, he has signed his own death warrant. The cops will eventually kill him instead of taking him into custody. He accepts this with equanimity. For Mesrine, true death is wage slavery. Physical death is simply the end of life.
However, Mesrine pays a terrible price for his freedom. He cannot have a normal existence. He is forced to skulk around to see his family, a fox hunted by the baying dogs of what he sees as the fascist state.
I kind of see his point, but even though the state is run for the benefit of the rich and powerful, I don’t see how the sort of anarchy that would follow if others followed Mesrine’s example would be much of an improvement. I’ll be content with my ratty cage, thank you very much. I get enough to eat, I have a roof over my head, and I get to indulge in my hobby of watching and writing about movies.
But enough about me. How’s the action?
The mayhem is shot and choreographed just as crisply as in Death Instinct. Several incidents, if you didn’t know they actually happened, would frankly be unbelievable. Mesrine manages to escape from not one, not two, but three maximum security prisons. One time, he boasted to his jailers that he would break out of prison within three months. Mesrine beat his own deadline.
In the end, I developed a grudging admiration for Mesrine. He lived his life on his own terms, made no compromises, and enjoyed the heck out of himself. We should all be so lucky.
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