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Mesrine: Killer Instinct

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Mesrine: Killer Instinct (2008)

October. 22,2008
|
7.5
|
R
| Drama Action Thriller Crime
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Jacques Mesrine, a loyal son and dedicated soldier, is back home and living with his parents after serving in the Algerian War. Soon he is seduced by the neon glamour of sixties Paris and the easy money it presents. Mentored by Guido, Mesrine turns his back on middle class law-abiding and soon moves swiftly up the criminal ladder.

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ManiakJiggy
2008/10/22

This is How Movies Should Be Made

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Merolliv
2008/10/23

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

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Paynbob
2008/10/24

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

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Aryana
2008/10/25

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

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Alanjackd
2008/10/26

This is what the Godfather hoped to be. A tale of people empowered by brutality and greed with little or no interest in the consequences.All of the Hollywood rubbish pales by comparison to this..to name but a few..Public Enemy No1..the Godfather trilogy mess...the ridiculous Black Mass..the list goes on.this is a million miles better than anything Hollywood can churn out..acted and filmed perfectly , this is a semi biopic and semi gangster tale which proves you do not have to be a big movie house to make big movies.Throw away your Godfather dvds and get this on your shelf.

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Frank Liesenborgs
2008/10/27

When I saw the movie, I noticed a lot of similarities with the gang Haemers (Bende van Haemers) in Belgium. Patrick Haemers was a Belgian criminal. He was head of the gang which kidnapped former Belgian prime minister Paul Vanden Boeynants from 14 January 1989 to 13 February 1989. Also planned to kidnap Mr Heineken. When you would make a blueprint of the story of Mesrine and Haemers, it really looks like the public enemy nr 1 of France and the public enemy number 1 of Belgium are a carbon copy in many aspects. Robberies, prison escapes and moving up the ladder to kidnapping. I did not know the story of Mesrine but the performance of Vincent Cassel adds flavor to the movie. The prelude tries to explain how the connections in his brain shifted to a ruthless and brutal killer. A must see.

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operdoc
2008/10/28

Some plot points discussed. Spoiler alert.Mesrine seems to have been a very bright sociopath and bank robber and killer. He certainly starts out that way in this movie. The movie opens with Mesrine, played by the magnetic Vincent Cassel, as an interrogator of Algerian rebels during the French/Algerian War (1959). His temperament gets the best of him and he shoots the prisoner.From there we follow him back to France as he establishes himself as a gangster. Most of this happens much too quickly and without real explanation, which becomes exasperating by the half way point of the movie. Hard to say what the director had in mind. I sense that he didn't really know. Mesrine is definitely charismatic and this shows in his interactions with his lovers (one of whom becomes his wife for long enough to produce three children). His interactions with his friends and associates (particularly Gerard Depardieu) are engaging and a few scenes are truly excellent filmmaking. It's worth seeing the movie just to see Cassel and Depardieu in some of the early scenes.The episodic nature of the movie and the puzzling motivations of Mesrine become tiresome after a while, and the prison break scenes are so badly filmed they are comical.Not a horrible film. Worth seeing for some fine acting, but hardly deserving of all the Cesar awards it accumulated. A better director with a better screenplay could have made a memorable film.

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Richard Burin
2008/10/29

This is a fast-paced, stylised biopic charting the rise of Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel), the murderer and media manipulator who became France's most wanted man. It begins with a methodical, initially cryptic sequence set in 1979, then flashes back, tracing Mesrine's service in the Algerian War and his relationship with his father, whom he derides as a collaborator, before enquiring: "Do balls skip a generation in this family?" Mesrine is hard to root for, beating women, spouting racist epithets and sticking a loaded revolver in his wife's mouth, while the movie's mid-section follows the crime/punishment film template too rigidly to be truly gripping, but the piece builds to a truly gobsmacking, nerve-shredding climax with a lo-fi prison escape that consists simply of the hero attempting to snip through surrounding fences with wire-cutters. Cassel is absolutely excellent in the lead, carrying the film on his shoulders and compensating for a script that sometimes skimps on its characters' motivations. Gerard Depardieu, as Mesrine's mentor, is a little underused, but adds weight to the supporting cast, his first meeting with Cassel being particularly memorable.

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