By Michael Walsh

Vincent Cassel furthered his notoriety among North American audiences in 2010 with his incredible performance in the Oscar-nominated Black Swan. While his exploding performance wasn’t nominated for an award itself, it could have been.

Before he was dancing alongside Natalie Portman in Darran Aronofsky’s latest, Cassel was one of France’s hottest upcoming actors. Performances in heralded films such as 1995’s minimalistic La Haine and 2002’s intense Irreversible cemented Cassel among the most brightest young actors in the business, a title he oddly enough regains with his arrival to North America with appearances in the second and third films in the Ocean’s series and a major role in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, where the French-born actor gave a rousing performance alongside the Oscar-nominated Viggo Mortensen.

You might wonder why I speak so much of one actor in Mesrine: Killer Instinct, the first of two films about well-known French gangster Jacques Mesrine.

Cassel, who plays the titular gangster, does so with an explosive energy and fire unseen of the genre in years. His performance is the most important aspect of the entire film, which shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the fact that it’s at heart a bio-pic about the bank-robbing and murderer that Mesrine was.

Jean-François Richet’s film is a good one itself. It breathes to life the work of Jean-Pierre Melville, who made gangsters priority number one through a stretch of filmmaking in the 1960’s and 1970’s in France. Like Melville, Richet’s film focuses it’s eyes on a particular gangster and the world exploding around him. Richet isn’t Melville, and that’s clear by the film’s unbalance between being a character study and action, something Melville had a clear grip on in his best-regarded films Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rogue.

Richet’s film instead relies heavily on Cassel’s worthwhile performance. The arcing story covers a lot of ground in a little time, despite having the life story of Mesrine spread over two films (part two is subtitled Public Enemy #1). Richet may jump from a scene of consequence for Mesrine – a murder, a robbery, something that leads to his next prison sentence. The painful prison aspects of the film are well-covered, but the film quickly jumps to a future life where Mesrine swears crime away to live happily ever after with his wife and children.

But the erratic nature of the film’s story-telling ability is nothing to worry about when it comes to turning the film on. It’s still a well-told vision of Mesrine, highlighted by high-octane action sequences, but defined by Cassel’s explosive performance of moral debauchery and elevated crime. It’s an intense portrayal of a man who hardly has any moral ambiguity and Cassel explores it intensely and well.

Richet’s film also gently straddles the border between the slight moral ambiguity found inside Mesrine’s mind. When he turns ‘soft’ and becomes a family man, there’s an open possibility that allows the viewer to explore the hardened criminal’s other side. But note the title of the film: it won’t last long. Mesrine, proven by Cassel’s beyond great performance, finds the killer instinct inside himself to accurately portray the lifestyle of Mesrine.

Style abound, Richet’s film fits within the classic lexicon of French gangster films. While it won’t be a classic on Melville’s level and doesn’t exactly have the best narrative balance, Mesrine: Killer Instinct is a worthwhile film in a revived genre.