Mesrine –
Public Enemy Number One
Stylistically at least, albeit
not quite on a par in terms of it’s power to engage, Mesrine, Public Enemy Number One matches its predecessor, Killer Instinct. Both suffer, and PENO to a greater extent, from a certain
lack of focus, which derives ultimately from the fact that for Jacques
Mesrine, at least on this evidence, life was a series of excapades; as he himself has it,
“I don’t want to wish my life away”. The net effect is that some
characters, notably his daughter, are introduced and exit without much pass
being paid to them, the overall style of storytelling resembling that of an
excited child talking about a visit to the circus – and then this happened, and then that happened, and then something else happened – with little
care for unification, save for the fact that it all “happened” to
Mesrine.
It could be said that the
escapades related here differ little from those told in KI , so a simple tedium enters
the equation. This is never more in evidence than in the final scenes, which
revisit, at that stage, and between the two movies, for the third time, the
events leading up to Mesrine’s ambush by French legal forces in Paris. In point
of fact, the issue is that we are learning nothing new about Mesrine by these
repeated recountings of daring bank raids and heavy-handed extortion attempts. Arguably, our
questions arising from KI as to his
political credentials are somwewhat dealt with, with the topic being given more
treatment onscreeen. This was the era, the 1970’s, of the Baader Meinhof Gang
and the Red Brigades, among others, groups who also carried out bank robberies,
Mesrine’s apparent principle source of income. But, despite his posturings, and
unlike those other organisations, we never learn of him using these ill-gotten
gains to progress any political goal.
Perhaps because he endures
little of the abuse at the hands of prison guards that he did in KI,