I love Vincent Cassel, although I haven't seen a heap of his work, I have seen enough to have me captivated by his presence on screen.

So the prospect of playing one of the most feared gangsters in France in two back to back films about the man's life was hugely exciting.

Death Instinct (L' Instinct de mort) and Public Enemy Number One (L' Ennemi public n° 1) see the superb and enigmatic Vincent Cassel play Jacques Mesrine, a man who committed burglaries, robberies, kidnappings, dealt in arms smuggling and claimed to have murdered some thirty nine people. He earned the nickname of the man of a hundred faces for his constant disguises.

Mesrine wrote part of his autobiography, which he called Death Instinct ( / ), in 1973 when he was in a French prison, this seems to have been credited to the film Public Enemy Number One, with Abdel Raouf Dafri writing the screenplay and the story for the film version of Death Instinct. Jean-François Richet is directing both films.

You can see the very short teaser trailer over at Canal Plus through Twitch. You can see it by selecting "Exclu - Sortie Prevues En 2008" and heading to four minutes twenty five seconds in, unless you want to see the Asterix clip that is!