Miss Flicks

Napoleon: Film Review

Joaquin Phoenix has reunited with director Ridley Scott for the first time since 2000’s Gladiator for Napoleon, which is unfortunately nowhere near as strong and powerful as their first collaboration.

As the title suggests, Napoleon charts French leader Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise and fall as well as his relationship with his wife, Empress Josephine (Vanessa Kirby).

Napoleon doesn’t tell one cohesive story but rather a collection of episodes in Bonaparte’s life. I struggled to engage with this choppy narrative because it didn’t flow, it was tonally all over the place and felt incomplete. I preferred the marriage side of the story because it had a clearer throughline, it was easier to follow and Kirby was absolutely brilliant.

While the battle scenes were visually glorious – Scott knows his way around an epic war scene – the context behind them was seriously lacking. Although the movie is historically inaccurate, it still assumes you know some French history because it doesn’t fully explain why Bonaparte is going into battle yet again. For most of the war scenes, I knew very little about the reason behind them and struggled to get invested or care about what was going on. I just enjoyed them purely on a visual level because the epic scale was impressive.

The story was also lacking in detail and explanation in other areas. The final third in particular felt rushed and like there was a lot of information missing. For example, Bonaparte’s second wife Marie Louise was never mentioned again after she bore him a child. As I don’t know his history, I had many questions that the movie didn’t answer. Perhaps they will be addressed in Scott’s four-and-a-half-hour director’s cut, which will be released on Apple TV+ at a later date.

It’s interesting that Scott got the cast of House of Gucci to speak with Italian accents but didn’t do the same with Napoleon. The cast speaks in their normal voices instead of with a French twang. That’s probably for the best, but it feels very jarring.

Presumably, the movie is meant to be a serious historical drama, yet there are some scenes that are unintentionally hilarious. There are bizarre tonal shifts that only seem to affect Phoenix’s performance. Everybody else is acting in a straight-faced drama while he occasionally does or says something so silly that you can’t help but laugh. For that reason, I didn’t know what to make of his performance. Thankfully, Kirby did not disappoint.

Napoleon feels like a disjointed collection of snapshots instead of a flowing narrative and I could not get into it.

In cinemas from Friday 24th November and on Apple TV+ from Friday 1st March