Half-Assed Movie Reviews

September 12, 2008: L’Instinct de la Mort

I’m not sure when I discovered Vincent Cassel.  It might have been in Irreversible, which is certainly not the prettiest way to be introduced to anyone, though of course he fared better in that film than others did…  He was in a weird little French movie named Sheitan that I caught at a Toronto International Film Festival Midnight Madness screening a couple of years ago.  And I don’t like to mention Ocean’s Twelve, but he does seem a reasonable addition to that crew, despite the grossly overindulgent plotline of that particular movie.

I like him as a leading man, so I was looking forward to L’Instinct de la Mort, a French-language look at noted French gangster Jacques Mesrine who ended up spending a good chunk of time in Canada.  I knew going in that this was intended to be “Part 1 of 2”, but I hadn’t expected it to cut off so suddenly, in the vein of Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, or Back to the Future Part 2.

The movie follows Mesrine’s life after he returns from fighting in a war, and we learn how his callousness goes right to the core, as he destroys people, property and relationships left and right as the years wear on.  He’s fearless and stubbornly loyal (to a fault) not to anyone, but to his own convictions.  He’s going to do what he sets his mind to, and if he has to die trying, so be it.

The feeling I got watching this movie, unfortunately, was that it just never sought to cut very deep.  It’s a retelling of a story, with minimal depth to the interpretation of the character, so we’re left with a bunch of action set pieces and a fiery performance by Cassel, but with nothing really to say about any of it.

The value of a film like this is that it brings some part of a real-life historical story to a larger audience, inspiring the desire to learn more about the real history and further details.  In this respect, the movie succeeds, but as a gangster flick it’s pretty hollow, and as a biopic it leaves us wondering what’s the point of putting all of this up on the screen.