‘Micmacs’ ‘ charm and imagination overwhelm its characters

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's junkyard commando picture "Micmacs" would make an interesting double bill with "The A-Team."

You've got a pair of action comedies featuring teams of colorful characters devising and enacting intricate revenge schemes, but "Micmacs" is the smaller, more intimate, less bombastic and more Gallic version of "The A-Team."

And probably the more socially responsible, since its theme is all about recycling, even down to the music, pieced together from the compositions of 1940s Hollywood composer Max Steiner.

This complements the main character, a video clerk named Bazil (Dany Boon) obsessed with Howard Hawks' "The Big Sleep," the movie he's watching when he's randomly shot in the head during a drive-by gone haywire.

Those familiar with Jeunet's work ("Amelie") know that few things in his universe are truly random, and indeed it turns out the bullet that wounds Bazil is made by the same munitions company that produced the mine that killed his father.

Bazil emerges from the hospital alive, but with the bullet permanently and dangerously lodged in his head, giving him increased powers of perception and an increased chance of fainting at any moment.

The latter makes it hard to find work, and Bazil is adopted by a band of subterranean homeless people (the Micmacs) who live below ground in an urban cavern of recycled, repurposed junk.

It's a beautifully detailed and imagined world by designer Aline Bonetto and Jeunet, whose love of contraptions and made-up worlds (dating to "Delicatessen") is well known.

Jeunet himself recycles and repurposes gags from the silent-film era - when the Micmacs decide to take revenge on the munitions company, Jeunet frames a half-dozen elaborate "Mission Impossible" sequences that unfold wordlessly.

The movie is ingeniously executed, and yet, after about an hour of it, I was more than ready for it to end.

Jeunet's active imagination so infuses his movies that it sometimes overwhelms his own characters, and there is little development or deepening of the Micmacs, save for a growing love story between Bazil and the Micmacs' resident contortionist (Julie Ferrier).

The chemistry is on screen, the consummation off, a rare and unpleasing instance of French romantic restraint.