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A tougher, smarter film than American sci-fi cinema buffs are used to seeing.

Subtlety has never been one of Jeunet’s tools, and the comedy in Bigbug is enjoyably over-the-top, occasionally a bit too mannered, and often laugh-out-loud funny.

With his work now migrating online and his jerry-rigged methods increasingly outsourced to post-production effects, Jeunet can’t avoid the impending digitization of cinema, nor life. Still, he’s not going down without landing a few good fingers to the ribs first.

There’s a lot going on in Bigbug, yet at the same time it can feel like there’s too little meat on the bone here, particularly when stretched about two hours. It is nice seeing the filmmaker back behind the camera; you also can’t help the wish his return after nearly a decade had been with something more substantial.

If only Jeunet had instilled his story and characters with a little more of that ingenuity, then Bigbug might have been a more substantial watch.

Bigbug’s garish and confusing world does linger in the mind after the credits roll, primarily because we’re only permitted to see a tiny slice of it. Trapped in the bottle, looking out, everything looks distorted and larger than life, but vaguely, scarily recognizable.

It’s impressive what Jeunet is able to pull off with a shoestring budget, but the ideas and characters underpinning his visual imagination leave a lot to be desired.

Despite some snappy ideas (an aggressive advertising drone pushing products as answers to the family’s every problem), Bigbug is overdressed, overlong and diminishingly amusing

Save for dashes of Jeunet’s bespoke visual flair and an enthusiastic cast of actors whose go-for-broke performances scream for stronger material, Bigbug doesn’t resemble a late-career misstep from a beloved auteur so much as it does the product of a neural network that was simultaneously forced to binge-watch “The Terminator” and “The Dinner Game” until it spat out a shooting script.

The result is an aggressively unfunny look at human-robot relations in a garish, cartoonishly rendered future.