Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic A chyron that appears at the end of “Napoleon,” after two and a half hours of turgid spectacle and grime-encrusted showmanship, informs that France’s self-anointed emperor oversaw 61 battles, listing the six that director Ridley Scott opted to stage for our benefit … or for his own glory.
The director’s motives are unclear, much like those of Napoleon Bonaparte as played by Joaquin Phoenix, who gives a mumbly and oddly anti-charismatic performance as the figure — short, slender and something of an outsider, owing to his Corsican birth — who came to rule France after the revolution.
Here, from the master of the modern epic, comes an undeniably impressive technical achievement: a bombastic old-school “great man” movie of the sort that dominated Hollywood in the late ’50s and early ’60s.
But times are not the same, and though Scott is wise to which way the wind blows (he demonstrated as much in his medieval-reckoning movie “The Last Duel”), he’s less instinctive about how best to position such a biopic for a moment skeptical of power-hungry patriarchs.
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