From IMDB:
Through improbable circumstances, Bazil (Dany Boon) loses everything after a bullet gets lodged in his skull. Homeless, he's taken in by a motley crew of salvaging outcasts making a living off Paris' discarded junk. When Bazil happens upon the weapons/munitions companies that cost him his old life, he and his new friends embark on a series of capers to shut both companies down and bring their chairmen to justice.
Misfits are often exiled from the harsh concrete jungle. They congregate on the outskirts and collect like the freaks of the circus they’re branded to be. Bazil and his own band of cartoon-like companions (including the captivating, abrasive contortionist and the human calculator of a girl next door) live their lives as the tramps they are regulated to be, each it’s own defect in tow. Once Bazil inspires them to take on his own personal Road Runner, the defected combine perfectly with greater purpose: to storm back into the world that’s painfully pushed them away.
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Fantastical tricks and gadgets are sprung literally like clockwork, as Bazil’s minions climb rung by rung up a ladder that leads to the hopeful downfall of two corrupt businesses of war. They play out so perfectly these foils, each one topping the last, so much that you forget how improbable they are. Each character demands that you fall in love with them at some juncture, to the point that you feel like you’re rooting on colleagues at a sporting event. Drama, humor, intelligence, and most of all heart dance on the screen in unison as the madness unfolds in a spectacle that can only be described as a junkyard filled with roses.
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Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet brings the quirkiness of his Amélie (and multiple members of its cast) and paints yet another amazing world for his players to work within. Do circumstances become too over the top? Are things so far-fetched that the unbelievable will damage the art being sold to your eyes? Perhaps, but dig a little deeper. A boy’s family was stolen from him by the dark hand of war. As he’s grown, yet another blow is dealt to him, shattering his world and literally his mind. Are the next logical events of a broken life meant to seem logical, or more like trying to sort out your own reflection in a mirror shattered on the street? That image you discover may not seem correct, but it’s no less the essence of what a man can be.
Micmacs à tire-larigot (Non-stop shenanigans) does to adult viewer’s minds much what Wile E. and the Road Runner did to them when they were kids. It paints a fantasy world on a real-life backdrop, and meshes the reality and the cartoon into one soul.
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[Editor's Note: Micmacs opens Friday, July 16 at Muvico Baywalk 20 and IMAX.
For more reviews of the summer's biggest releases, check out the Daily Loaf Movie Review Index.]
Wile E. Coyote never had much luck capturing the Road Runner through use of bombs and or missiles. And though his lifelong goal was only realized but once, it was always his use of clever, out of the ordinary tricks that got him closest to his prize.
Comparing the whimsically satirical Micmacs (Micmacs à tire-larigot) to a famous animated feature is fitting. For within the world of Micmacs, or possibly the seductive imagination of main character Bazil’s head, lies a world that's a brazen caricature. A clash of brutality vs. enchantment; high-tech vs. scrapped together ingenuity; stark death vs. bold living. Micmacs is an unlikely marriage not of romance, but of defiance.
