Micmacs

Dany Boon plays a Frenchman who once lost his father to a roadside bomb and later caught a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting and now finds himself adopted by a confederacy of junkyard misfits, whom he enlists in the vengeful enterprise of a cartoonishly violent, elaborately calculated feud between rival arms dealers. Whew. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, most famously of Amélie, piles on with his usual inventive spectacle, unnecessary camera moves, syrupy color schemes, winking sentiment and whimsy, so much whimsy! Co-writing with Guillaume Laurant, Jeunet seems to wonder how we can still hate mimes if we also love silent-movie slapstick and Tex Avery burlesque, but the answer is that there still is such a thing as discretion. Still, Boon has a great bearing and his clever castmates include Yolande Moreau, Dominique Pinon and André Dussollier.