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Friday, February 19, 2010

BD impressions: Mesrine

3:35 PM / BD Impressions / 2 Comments

I knew very little about Jacques Mesrine (pronounced "meh-reen" rather than "mez-reen") before watching this two-part biopic starring Vincent Cassel as the titular French ganster, and after watching it I wasn't convinced I knew all that much more, except that he was fond of women and attention in equal measure and managed to survive for so long due to a combination of blind luck and sheer audacity. Not many people could pull off a successful escape from a maximum security prison - Mesrine managed FOUR in his lifetime, on one occasion fleeing a courtroom in the middle of his sentencing.

Cassel and director Jean-François Richet (yes, the guy who directed the remake of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13) don't seem to be entirely sure whether they want to simply present the facts or spin an action-packed, crowd-pleasing yarn about a lethal yet charismatic nutcase, but they lean more towards the latter. Certainly they are successful as far as creating a tense, engaging thriller is concerned, particularly in the first instalment, KILLER INSTINCT (the second part, PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER 1, suffers a little from an excessive running time and the fact that it essentially devolves into a formula of "heist, chase scene, jailbreak, chase scene, heist, chase scene..."). However, I did find myself slightly frustrated by the films' treatment of Mesrine himself. No attempt is made to explain why he ended up the way he did, barring a brief flashback to his experiences as a soldier in Algeria, which some may interpret is suggesting that the horrors he witnessed and participated in may have been responsible for unbalancing him. As a result, we don't really get a handle on him, and there's something slightly disconcerting about the manner in which the films lurch between portraying him as a scumbag (this is a man who on one occasion shoves a pistol into his wife's mouth, and on another beats a journalist within an inch of his life for criticising him in a newspaper article) and appearing to implicitly expect us to cheer for him as he outsmarts the authorities yet again. I've a feeling this may actually be deliberate - contrasting the romanticised myth of Mesrine as a Robin Hood figure with stark depictions of the the sort of low-life he really was - but the result is a pair of films that feel slightly schizophrenic at times. I read one review which suggested that the films felt as if they had been written by Mesrine himself, such is the extent to which they aggrandise him, and I'm tempted to concur, even if they do stop short of condoning his actions.

Undoubtedly the greatest strength of the two films is Cassel, and everything you've heard about him in the role is true: he really is amazing. He may not provide us with much insight into how Mesrine's mind works, but that's because of the script rather than his performance. At any rate, at no point is his Mesrine anything less than an utterly (and frighteningly) believable person, taking command of every scene in which he appears (and I can count on one hand the number in which he doesn't). A fine array of supporting performers, including Gérard Depardieu, Mathieu Amalric, Elena Anaya and Ludivine Sagnier, provide backup, but that's about as far as their contributions go: everyone and everything is in service to Mesrine himself, and they never really come to the fore as three-dimensional characters. This is particularly true of the various women he picks up during the course of his lengthy reign of terror, who all seem to vacillate between gazing doe-eyed at him and then going off in a strop once they realise they play second fiddle to his lifestyle as a career criminal.

Flawed? You bet, but thanks to Cassel's bravura performance and Richet's assured, kinetic direction, the two films are never less than thoroughly engaging. KILLER INSTINCT is the better of the two thanks to its more solid structure and more efficient handling of the narrative, but together they make up an excellent double bill that demonstrates yet again just how good the French are when it comes to action cinema.

Image quality: I'm extremely impressed by how good MESRINE looks on BD. Both films, which have a combined running time of over four hours, have been squeezed on to a single BD-50, but for the most part you honestly wouldn't know from looking at them. Although detail is a little inconsistent, shifting from extremely sharp to ever so slightly soft, I'm inclined to blame the materials rather than the disc itself. The compression is also surprisingly good given how much material is on the disc. You might spot the odd bit of artefacting in the backgrounds here and there in the screen captures below, but for the most part there's nothing to complain about, and certainly nothing untoward jumped out at me in motion. Could they have looked even better if each had been given its own disc? I suppose it's possible, but the quality of the presentation is good enough that at no point did I find myself playing the "what if...?" game. 9.5/10

Mesrine: Killer Instinct
studio: Momentum; country: UK; region code: B; codec: VC-1;
file size: 15.8 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 19.99 Mbit/sec

Mesrine: Public Enemy Number 1
studio: Momentum; country: UK; region code: B; codec: VC-1;
file size: 18.6 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 20 Mbit/sec

2 Comments

 
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