By Stephen Holden
New York Times News Service
Vincent Cassel, the cocky, snake-eyed French actor with a prizefighter’s mug is so charismatic in “Mesrine,” a four-hour biography of the notorious French gangster Jacques Mesrine, that you can’t take your eyes off him.
The only distractions from Cassel’s performance are the flashy turns by the actresses — Elena Anaya, Cecile de France and Ludivine Sagnier — playing the restless women drawn to Mesrine like iron filings to a red-hot magnet. The movie is a virtual ode to a bad boy’s fatal attraction for women who should know better but can’t resist the thrill of dangerous attachment to a man who devotes the same intensity to sex that he does to robbing banks, killing policemen and escaping from prison.
The film is divided into two parts, each roughly two hours. “Mesrine: Killer Instinct” (Part 1), which opens today, begins in 1979, when Mesrine was murdered by police while preparing to leave Paris, then flashes back to his early years in Algeria, France and Canada. “Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1” (Part 2) which follows Nov. 12, covers the last years of his life after his return to France.