Saturday January 23, 2010
6pm:  MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT
8.15pm:  MESRINE: PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE

France 2008    113 minutes(part 1)    133 minutes (part 2)   15 certificate
Directed by Jean-Francois Richet, starring Vincent Cassel

Jacques Mesrine was perhaps little known this side of the channel, but in his native France he was something of a folk hero – bank robber, killer, serial jail breaker, relentless self publicist and media darling. Revelling in his very public notoriety, he spent his time inside in the embellishment of his own mythology, and wrote an autobiography – Death Instinct - the source material for Richet’s thrilling, edge-of-your-seat two-parter.

The films chart Mesrine’s two decades of legendary criminal feats (including numerous, increasingly spectacular, prison breaks), finishing on 2 November, 1979, when he was executed in a hail of police bullets, an extra-judicial operation for which no prosecution was ever made.

Vincent Cassel is mesmerising in the role of his career: Mesrine is a brutal man, a properly nasty character, and his account of his own life is sufficiently warts and all to avoid hagiography. However, he is also ambiguous and compellingly charismatic – quick witted, man of his word, master of disguise - to the extent that we are reluctantly persuaded of his frightening allure.

The two films were inexplicably released in the UK during July and August, meaning that those of us who ignore the summer film schedules missed the opportunity to enjoy one of the year’s most blistering movie experiences. So, as a special treat, we bring you the two of them back to back for an evening of quality gritty gangster cinema – we’re talking more The Long Good Friday than The Untouchables - what the Guardian described as “muscular, forthright storytelling, hard-smoking, hard-drinking action, horribly incorrect attitudes... and bushy moustaches..”

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