Movie a Day Blog finds that sometimes films mysteriously rise to the top of one’s Netflix queue. You might vaguely remember entering it as a recommendation from a good review or a film festival roundup, and suddenly, there it is in your mailbox. The best scenario, of course, is when this basically unknown movie turns out to be terrific, crackling with suspense and dramatic tension, and featuring a powerhouse performance from Vincent Cassel, who goes a long way towards redeeming his maddening manipulations in BLACK SWAN (Movie a Day Blog, Dec. 10, 2010). This is part one of two back-to-back French crime movies directed by Jean-François Richet, who previously helmed the underrated remake of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (2005) but he has improved on his game in the first entry and I have high hopes for the concluding chapter, MESRINE: PUBLIC ENEMY. Cassel’s title character is a no-nonsense veteran of the French Army’s brutality in Algeria – one key incident at the beginning of the movie sets up his cold-blooded ability to shoot human beings, although only he gets to decide who he’ll plug. Cassel’s character, while endearing to both women and the audience in his gentler moments, is always a professional killer and criminal, whose boss is an equally charming and violent Gerard Depardieu. Yet Mesrine is also someone with whom we empathize and even root for. It’s a nifty accomplishment by both Cassel and co-writer/director Richet, who keeps the momentum going fast enough that we don’t really stop to wonder why we’re encouraging a psychopath. To say Cassel’s characters has a number of emotional issues is Gallic understatement, and Richet and co-writer Abdel Raouf Dafri are not afraid to show his innate brutality in scenes such as a domestic argument with his wife that quickly escalates into something approximating rape with a gun. All of his bad habits, emotionally and socially, get him thrown into prison fairly often, and the sequence of Cassel’s solitary confinement in a brutal French special corrections unit makes Abu Grhaib look like a model prison. It equals anything I’ve seen in the honor roll of prison brutality films, headed by MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (Alan Parker, 1988) and THE HURRICANE (Norman Jewison, 1999), a tradition begun by the Warner Bros. classic I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932, Movie a Day Blog, March 31, 2011). What doesn’t kill gangster Mesrine only makes him stronger, although in this case that means more lethal. He breaks out of a French maximum-security prison through his keen understanding of human nature (the guards are hung over and sleepy on early Monday afternoons) and pulls off an impossible escape. But Mesrine lives by a strict moral code, so in a near-suicidal move, Cassel and a well-cast Roy Dupuis as his partner in crime return to the jail to liberate the rest of the prisoners, too. Mesrine is that kind of guy, which is great if you’re in prison for rape and murder, but makes the rest of us a bit nervous. We don’t have time for any of these moral qualms while the movie’s going on at a breakneck pace that Richet ensures never falters for a moment. It’s difficult to imagine where he could go from this artistic plateau except further down Mesrine’s highway to hell.

L’instinct de mort. Dir: Jean-François Richet. 113 mins. French, Arabic, Spanish with English subtitles. La Petite Reine, Remstar Prods. Produced by Thomas Langmann.  Screenplay by Abdel Raouf Dafri, Richet from scenario by Dafri, based on book by Jacques Mesrine. Cinematography by Robert Gantz. Edited by Hervé Schneid. Production design by Emile Ghigo. Music by Eloi Painchaud. With Vincent Cassel, Gerard Depardieu, Cecile De France, Gilles Lellouche, Roy Dupuis, Elena Anaya, Florence Thomassin, Michel Duchaussoy, Myriam Boyer, Dino Clavet, Ludivine Sagnier. Viewed on DVD.