Senator Robs Two-pic Biopic ‘Public Enemy No.1’

Other than the Che two-parter, there was another un et deux film combo available at this year’s Cannes market. The Hollywood Reporter reports that a 20-minute promo shown at the fest was enough to get Senator Film hooked, and studio head Marco Weber’s recent viewing of both films currently in post-prod was enough to get the new distributor kid on the block to pluck the U.S rights to the 80 million dollar project – and about 80 times the price tag of Stander.

Directed by Jean-François Richet (Assault on Precinct 13), the first film Death Instinct (L’Instinct de Mort) will probably preem at one of the bigger film festivals this fall and receive a domestic French release before we see the film hit U.S turf (best case scenario is late 08′).

Vincent Cassel plays Jacques Mesrine, known as a robin hood who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, he has just returned from fighting in Algeria in the late ’50s to become the “man of a thousand faces,” a disguise artist who robbed, kidnapped, murdered and screwed his way around Canada, the U.S. and France during the ’60s and ’70s until the police gunned him down on the outskirts of Paris in 1979.

I have no idea where part one ends and part two (Public Enemy No.1) begins, but we can make the logical deduction that the part one will see the pesky Mesrine combat and evade French law, while part two will see him do some hard time in North America.