French gangster Jacques Mesrine profiled in ‘Mesrine: Killer Instinct’

Given that cinema has been fascinated by great train robbers and other bandits since birth, it's a wonder we moviegoers haven't met Jacques Mesrine before.

Mesrine, public enemy No. un in France for a decade, was fearless, seductive, preening, colorful, brutal, amoral - a highly cinematic character in a highly cinematic country.

No jail could hold him, no law could deter him, and few women could resist him. Like normal humans, however, he could do nothing about the weather, and when the forecast finally called for a hail of bullets, he fared no better than Clyde Barrow and John Dillinger (don't get your spoiler shorts in a bunch - we see his demise in the very first scene).

In cinematic terms, the man has been woefully underrepresented, a condition the French-made, four-hour, two-part "Mesrine: Killer Instinct" succeeds in rectifying, with verve.

We meet Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) on the cusp of his criminal career, serving in the French army by torturing captive Algerian "terrorists" in the late 1950s.

He musters out, tries the 9-to-5 life and finds it insufficiently larcenous, and so takes a job doing odd criminal jobs for a Jabba-the-Hutt-ish thug (Gerard Depardieu, in Brando mode).

The episodic first hour of the movie, with its sudden outburst of violence and often comic depictions of anything-for-a-buck criminal activity, backed by jangling period tunes, has the fizzy kick of early "Goodfellas."

But Mesrine the man, and "Mesrine" the movie, are too restive to fit under one heading. Mesrine takes up with a gun-wielding moll, and the movie echoes "Bonnie and Clyde." He knocks over banks and, like Dillinger, develops a taste for headlines. He takes on a terrorist sidekick, but has no interest in liberating anything but himself.

Or fellow prisoners - in one typically lively sequence, he busts out of jail, then returns with guns and his gigantic set of cojones to free more inmates.

His crazed bravado makes him irresistible to newspapers and females - women drift in and out of his life, as hookers, wives, business partners, but Mesrine makes it clear that his only priority is his next job, his next franc.

Why? The movie considers his upbringing, his military service, his politics, but rejects any and all as a motivator. So what makes him tick? The plotless movie, and Mesrine himself, are difficult to read or predict. Still, for at least two hours, he's fun to watch (and Cassel is magnetic in the lead).

Part one opens today, and stands confidently alongside any recent gangster movie.

Part two opens next Friday, and adds length but not much insight to the riddle of Mesrine. It features a paunchier, middle-aged Mesrine (Cassel added 30 pounds), in every way a less dashing and attractive figure. His need for media attention morphs from vanity to pathology, and he ends up like some reality-show antecedent, desperate and petty and self-absorbed.

It's director Jean-Francois Richet's aim to demystify, and deromanticize Mesrine, perhaps the criminal life in general, and he succeeds.

Thus, when it finally starts to hail, it's not a moment too soon.