Bazil, the hero of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film, “Micmacs,” is a mild-mannered fellow with a serious grudge. When he was a child, he lost his father, a member of the French Foreign Legion, to a land mine. Sometime later, after a stint in an orphanage, the adult Bazil (Dany Boon) is minding his own business, working the night shift at a video store and reciting Humphrey Bogart’s French-dubbed dialogue in “The Big Sleep,” when a stray bullet pierces his forehead, nearly killing him.

Both disasters might be classified as accidents, but Bazil traces the mine and the bullet to rival armaments companies, whose offices sit across from each other in an industrial zone on the fringe of Paris, and whose chief executives are contrasting studies in corporate arrogance.

Fenouillet (André Dussollier) is an old-fashioned haute-bourgeois stuffed shirt, whose passion is collecting the body parts of historical figures, like Marilyn Monroe’s molar. His nemesis, Marconi (Nicolas Marié), is a more modern type, with fashionable stubble on his face, an ultramodern apartment and a young son being raised mainly by a taciturn African nanny.

With the help of a crew of misfit junk collectors  the Micmacs of the title  Bazil sets out to take revenge on these masters of war, pursuing a campaign of sabotage and humiliation that is at once whimsically prankish and deeply earnest.