-By Doris Toumarkine

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Audiences who patronize Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 (part two) will be best served if they’re already seen part one and are aware that anti-hero Jacques Mesrine really existed and authored the autobiography upon which the script is based. But so strong is part two of France’s acclaimed, multi-César-winning biopic hit about one of the country’s most notorious criminals, it can stand alone.

Taken together, the two Mesrine films are a towering achievement of the crime genre, akin to the Jean-Pierre Melville, Jules Dassin and similarly beloved muscular classics pitting felons against law enforcers, good against evil and exposing the ambiguities in between. Not quite as rich a canvas as the Godfather trilogy, the Mesrine films come close.

Public Enemy, another kinetic thrill ride, may not pack the emotional dividends of some of the better crime films, but star Vincent Cassel (son of French acting vet Jean-Pierre Cassel and soon to be seen in Black Swan) as the late-20th-century crime figure packs so much charisma into his sociopathic, id-driven monster of a character that he becomes dangerously all-too-human, if not often disturbingly attractive.

Why Mesrine became so bad is not the point here. Call it bad DNA or extreme, mysterious aberration, but evil, as history continually witnesses, just happens. So filmmaker Jean-François Richet and screenwriter Abdel Raouf Dabri ( A Prophet) have fashioned their Mesrine (no doubt with great help from Mesrine’s own literary self-portrait) as a hyper-masculine, arrogant, pleasure- and danger-seeking egomaniac.

Part one had left the gangster in the early ’70s, having made a daring escape from a Quebec prison following a ’60s crime spree of robberies, a kidnapping and murders. Public Enemy No. 1 is bookended by the violent 1979 capture of Mesrine, who is fatally shot, and his lover/partner Sylvia (Ludivine Sagnier), seriously wounded, on the Place de Clignancourt as they attempt their escape from Paris.

Part two is largely the saga of Mesrine towards this undoing. Now gloating as a “public enemy,” he is back in France and back to old tricks. With his husky, gun-toting lieutenant Michel Ardouin (Samuel Le Bihan), Mesrine is again robbing banks. On his trail is French police commissioner Broussard (Olivier Gourmet), whom Mesrine is not afraid to taunt. Broussard makes an arrest, but Mesrine, again showing his escape artistry, gets away and masterfully dons disguises to elude capture.

Again nabbed, he is thrown into the famous La Sante prison, where he befriends François Besse (Mathieu Amalric), another escape artist, and the inevitable happens. Both men are on the run but manage a heist at the Deauville casino and another uncanny escape in the Normandy countryside. But their antithetical personalities determine their fate: Mesrine’s brashness and determination let him elude the authorities; the more introverted Besse is captured in Brussels.

Mesrine kidnaps millionaire Henri Lelievre (Georges Wilson) and eventually retrieves the ransom. He continues to elude Broussard and, as a womanizer extraordinaire, takes up with Sylvia, the Bonnie to his Clyde.

A lethal variation of the libertarian, Mesrine has the audacity to imagine himself a revolutionary. He also has a fatal attraction to publicity and willingly, under conditions that protect his whereabouts, gives an interview to Paris Match. While thrilled with their coverage, he explodes over a negative article by a right-wing journalist. He entraps the writer, kidnaps him and leaves him for dead.

Cassel is the racing pulse of the film, but the often handheld cinematography and rapid-fire editing are also complicit in commanding viewer attention. The action scenes are “wow” factors not because of show-offy special effects but because they induce total immersion in what transpires. Supporting performances are all on target and composer Marco Beltrami’s score unobtrusively enhances every electric twist and turn.