From left, Benicio del Toro and Mia Threapleton star in Wes Anderson’s "The Phoenician Scheme." (TPS Productions/Focus Features/TNS)

Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme” opens with a bang: a grisly explosion, a plane crash and a dramatic close-up of tycoon Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), his battered face so lumpen and purple it resembles eggplant Parmesan. Zsa-zsa is a survivor, a fighter and an indefatigable entrepreneur; his relentless energy is matched by nothing else other than Alexandre Desplat’s thrilling ticking time bomb of a score.

He’s also a one-man plague whose ruinations include famine, slavery and a string of mysteriously dead ex-wives. “I never personally murdered anybody,” Zsa-zsa insists with unconvincing conviction. And yet, Anderson sells us on rooting for this robber baron. We are the film’s mark. It’s a pleasure to be so deftly swindled.

The scheme of the film’s title is Zsa-zsa’s grand plan to build a dam, tunnel and canal in coordinates that roughly correspond to Saudi Arabia, but are here known as Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia, presumably in honor of the ancient empire that prioritized trade over warfare and religion. Zsa-zsa has already convinced the necessary parties to agree: a prince (Riz Ahmed), two American industrialists (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston), a nightclub impresario (Mathieu Amalric), a sailor (Jeffrey Wright) and his cousin-slash-fiancée (Scarlett Johansson). Due to price-fixing sabotage by his enemies, though, Zsa-zsa must now convince everyone to earn a little less on the deal using every tactic from barked threats to sports bets to a gift basket of grenades.

These escapades are set in 1950 and have a handsome vintage color palette of white, gray, green, metal and wood. As Zsa-zsa, bloodied from his latest near-death escapade, lumbers toward a news camera clutching his innards (“a vestigial organ,” he says with a shrug), the only contemporary equivalent who measures up is the filmmaker Werner Herzog who, upon being shot in the gut mid-interview, dismissed it as “an insignificant bullet.”

What Zsa-zsa’s passion project will actually do is a bit vague, even after he unveils a spectacular working miniature with running water and toy trains that exists mostly for the delightful inevitability that someone is bound to stomp around on it like Godzilla. That’s not a weakness in the script. The idea seems to be that whatever it is, accomplishing it is the accomplishment — that the goal itself is the goal. There’s money involved, too, of course, and it sounds impressive: 5% of the profits for the next 150 years. But it’s not like Zsa-zsa will live long enough to reap the reward. Over the course of the movie, he’s nearly murdered a half-dozen times by bullets, bombs, poison gas and a good old-fashioned clobbering.

It’s not that you have to believe that there is a force out there more powerful than Zsa-zsa, or heck, even money itself. But if that doesn’t move you, at least Anderson deserves reverence for negotiating how to get all these A-list talents to act in his movie for peanuts. He’s managed to build yet another dazzler, a shrine to his own ambition and craft. And while it sometimes feels a bit drafty in the corners, the accomplishment itself is plenty.