Jean-François Richet’s two-part movie about Jacques Mesrine, France’s most notorious criminal, is substantially true — and you certainly couldn’t have invented it.

Everyone has their own idea about what made him tick. Richet’s is that Mesrine (Vincent Cassel), having been brutalised as a soldier in the Algerian war, returned to France to find petit-bourgeois life with his parents a bore and fell under the sway of an underworld boss (Gérard Depardieu) who encouraged him to rob banks and take one or two other laws into his own hands.

Despite occasional short breaks where he attempted to go straight, his life spiralled into racism, thuggery, crime, prison and escape that made him a world-renowned public enemy. We leave him at the height of his powers, with two fingers up to the Canadian and French police and Interpol (the second part of the film, released on 28 August, deals with his demise).

Richet’s work has been injudiciously but perhaps understandably compared to both Coppola’s The Godfather and Scorsese’s Goodfellas. The truth is that, one or two sequences apart, it hasn’t the consistent cinematic flair of either. But it remains totally watchable and, in Cassel, it has an actor as strong as anyone in either of those films.

He gives a remarkable performance, suggesting a gambler who couldn’t help taking risks — such as robbing a bank, waiting for the police to arrive and then making off to rob another one nearby while they investigate the first break-in.
He knew in his mind that there are no heroes in crime but refused to admit it in his heart. It was not for nothing that he called the autobiography he wrote in prison Death Instinct.

Mesrine was apparently charming enough to fix himself up with the women he wanted and hateful enough to treat the Spanish woman (Elena Anaya) who bore his children with appalling cruelty when she pleaded with him to live a normal life.

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He killed without compunction but remained the faithful friend of François Besse (Mathieu Amalric), a fellow criminal who refused to have blood on his hands but became known as the King of Escape.

Cassel accomplishes a difficult, sometimes contradictory part with huge skill. All the other parts are well played, including those of his women (Cécile de France is the Pigalle prostitute Jeanne and Ludivine Sagnier is his last love Sylvie, dubbed “the beautiful Italian” by the press).

Of itself, the film is no masterpiece; despite its fine production values, it is short on the mores of the time, which extends from the Fifties to the Seventies. However, there are moments when Richet surpasses himself, in particular the sequence in which Mesrine is incarcerated in a brutal Canadian maximum security prison and thrown into the harshest solitary confinement before organising a ridiculously daring escape.

Mesrine once wrote: “In hell you can really have fun. Only people who wouldn’t get bored out of their minds on earth get to go there.”

Who knows what is truth and what is fantasy? But as Richet says: “There was practically no need to invent. He was a movie character.”