Micmacs

Protagonist Dany Boon has an intimate connection to two weapons firms: One made the land mine that killed his father, and the other made the bullet that lodged in his head in a freak accident, costing him his job, his home, and a highly variable portion of his sanity. So in a development that feels like Jeff Bridges meeting Robin Williams in The Fisher King, times seven, he hooks up with a band of wacky dump-scavengers with highly specialized, odd abilities. Together, they set about undermining the arms-dealers via gimcrack inventions and complicated plans that bring all those odd abilities to bear like clockwork. Their antics incorporate a good deal of classic heist-movie moves and silent-movie slapstick.

But mostly, there’s a good deal of Jeunet. He’s cited a wide variety of influences on Micmacs, his first film since 2004’s A Very Long Engagement: Once Upon A Time In The West, Toy Story, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, Mission: Impossible—essentially any film about highly specialized, idiosyncratic talents coming together to challenge a more powerful, organized, or sophisticated foe. But the final result, with its barrage of oddball characters and breathless voiceover, its herky-jerky pacing and devotion to twee cuteness, its ultra-detailed settings and bright popping colors, are all straight from the Jeunet of Amélie. Longtime Jeunet fans may be a little disappointed at the film’s feather-lightness, which admits almost none of the grimness of his Delicatessen or Lost Children, and longtime Jeunet non-fans needn’t bother at all. But on its own, without comparison to his past work, Micmacs is an enjoyably weightless farce, a slapdash, stylish Rube Goldberg device made out of people instead of mechanical parts.