Mesrine: Killer Instinct began by showing how police gunned down French criminal/celebrity Jacques Mesrine in his car in 1979; it then jumped back in time to show how his life of crime began. Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1, the second half of Jean-François Richet’s biopic, begins where Killer Instinct’s opening left off, as police tout their accomplishment to the press and a crowd of onlookers, and a circus-like atmosphere surrounds Mesrine’s bloodied corpse. It’s a grim scene that recalls post-lynching celebrations in the American South, but it also gives Public Enemy an edge that Killer Instinct lacked. Most rise-and-fall crime stories end messily—Mesrine is frequently compared to John Dillinger or Clyde Barrow, both of whom similarly captured the public imagination, and were similarly shot down in public—but Public Enemy openly raises the question of why officers of the law hated Mesrine so much that they were willing to turn his death into a block party.
