Napoleon - Review Thread

My hopes were once fairly high for Napoleon, because it looked like Ridley Scott was operating pretty comfortably and confidently in the skillset that helped him make Gladiator so amazing back in 2000. But perhaps I need to remind myself to keep expectations in check when it comes to good ol' Ridley, because for every Gladiator or The Martian or The Last Duel that he does, he also has plenty of others like Napoleon that just don't manage to hit the mark in one way or another. In the case of this film, the fact that this is a 2-hour-and-40-minute or so movie that's an edited down version of a 4-hour cut is pretty glaringly obvious, which results in a film with a choppy flow and fairly scattershot story where things just sort of happen and characters go through changes in their lives without what feels like proper exploration. The movie feels like a Wikipedia article on Napoleon's life and accomplishments, as others have pointed out, instead of a fully fleshed-out story. Everything between Napoleon and Josephine, especially, feels kind of surface-level in spite of some admittedly strong scenes between Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby. Speaking of Phoenix's performance, though, I can understand what both he and Scott were going for here in terms of the picture of the man they wanted to paint here and the way they wanted to paint it, but the overall tone just continuously comes off as awkward in a lot of instances more than anything else. But that's not to say that this movie is completely without merit. Since this is still a Ridley Scott film, of course it's technically gorgeous and lavish, with every dollar of the massive budget on-screen, the battle sequences are all impressively staged and Vanessa Kirby honestly gives a very strong performance. But the rest of the movie around those things simply comes up short -- and, yes, pun very much intended.