Pun Salad

The movie opens in the 70's, showing a member of the French Foreign Legion getting blown up while trying to defuse a landmine in the middle of the Sahara. This drives his wife to the loony bin, and effectively orphans little Bazil, our hero. Bazil escapes from an oppressive orphanage, and grows up to manage a small video store, where he's content to lipsync Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall's dialogue in The Big Sleep, as dubbed into French. But misfortune strikes again, as a gunfight breaks out outside the store, and a stray bullet whangs right into his brain.

Please note: this movie is billed a comedy.

Miraculously, Bazil survives, but loses his job and becomes homeless. Fortunately he takes up with a colorful band of misfits living in a junkyard. And he decides to wreak vengeance on the weapons manufacturers that built the mine that killed his dad and manufactured the slug that still sits in his frontal lobe.

Again, please note: comedy.

Bazil and his cohorts are not merely colorful, they're charming and funny. They bring a diverse array of oddball talent to Bazil's plot. The heads of the weapons firms are slimy and arrogant, and richly deserve the fate that Bazil is plotting. (My normal troglodytic attitudes lead me to think that weapons manufacturers are pretty much OK folks, so it's a mark of the film's quality that it sucked me into its narrative on this point.)

It's directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously did Amélie, another charmer. There's lots of amusing cleverness and whimsy; it's mostly visual-based, which I won't attempt to describe. But after the initial grim carnage, I chuckled pretty much all the way through.