In a hospital, awaiting the birth of his first child, notorious French criminal Jacque Mesrine — still a few years shy of that notoriety — is asked if becoming a father will change him. “Times change, not men,” he responds, “least of all me.” It’s the sort of hard-boiled line that one can hardly imagine anyone actually saying in real life, but Mesrine: Killer Instinct, is at least two degrees removed from reality. For one thing, it’s based on the famously self-aggrandizing Mesrine’s own sensationalized memoirs. Secondly, it’s a movie, and director and co-screenwriter Jean-François Richet puts a title card right up front reminding us that all films are at least partly fiction.

Mesrine’s assessment of himself may be cinematic in delivery, but it’s not entirely inaccurate. As Richet presents him, Mesrine changes very little over the course of the decade-plus covered by the film, starting with his military service in Algeria in the late 50s, and stretching through his daring escape from (and then full-scale assault on) Quebec’s Saint-Vincent-de-Paul prison in the early 70s. Through it all, he is charismatic, clever, brash, and defiant, with a sense of vengeance so over-developed that he could be as dangerous to his loved ones as to his enemies.

To play this larger-than-life character, Richet casts a similarly magnetic performer, Vincent Cassel, an actor who combines the explosive intensity of a young Pacino with the slow-burning restraint of a young DeNiro. Cassel tears into the role with creative ferocity, never leaving any room to question why people were so involuntarily drawn to a man so obviously a violent threat to their well-being.