Picking up about where Mesrine: Killer Instinct left off, this is nonetheless a different film than its predecessor. You don’t particularly need to have seen part one to make sense of part two, and in fact there is hardly any character overlap, save Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) himself. Here Mesrine is no longer the angry young man. He is older and has settled into a career, albeit as a bank robber only dabbling in other crimes. He is still capable of violence but it seems more measured. He reserves most of his hatred for the police and those running France’s maximum-security prisons. He believes himself to have a credo, to be a man of his word even as he publishes an exaggerated memoir aimed at increasing his fame and notoriety.
Lacking some of the vitality of Killer Instinct, this installment is nearly a character study, though its prison-escape sequence bests the one in the first film, and there are multiple shootouts. Here his penchant for disguises is more prominent. Like the first film, this one starts off with his death in 1979. Since it begins in 1973, it doesn’t skip ahead in time as much. It’s still episodic, but less so. Unlike the first film, this ends where it begins, with the police killing Mesrine. We now see this, for the first time, from the viewpoint of the police, a clever reminder that, to them, this was no master criminal, no gentleman bandit, but a thug they were determined to take down.
IMDB link
viewed 9/8/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 9/8–9/10
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