Napoleon (2023, Ridley Scott) (Patreon)

41/100

Can't decide whether it wants to honor Napoleon or lampoon him, so just alternates haphazardly between epic battle sequences (which depict military strategy as a series of minute hand gestures and head nods) and goofy domestic/court intrigue (for which Phoenix more or less reprises his counterintuitively needy performance as Commodus). The latter aspect occasionally pushes too far into comic petulance for my taste—"You think you're so great because you have boats!" feels like a line that wandered in from Drunk History—but is mostly too sedate to catch fire; Phoenix is perpetually eager to beclown himself (literally as the Joker), but Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa still clearly want to create at least the illusion of a conventional great-man biopic, so we get 158 grueling minutes of wiki-section peppered at irregular intervals with brief flurries of pure ridicule (e.g. Napoleon fleeing his coup like a terrified rabbit when it erupts into bedlam—a moment that, apart from the set and costumes, would fit snugly in Beau Is Afraid). It's like casting Woody Allen as James Bond and having him play it straight 80% of the time. To say nothing of Phoenix being a good quarter-century older than Napoleon was at Toulon, and significantly older at every stage of his life save for St. Helena. Vanessa Kirby does her best to make Joséphine a credibly adversarial object of lifelong desire, but the attempt to make that relationship the film's spine...well, call it a severe case of scoliosis. Only the Battle of Austerlitz really grabbed me, thanks to the historically suspect but visually sound inclusion of Russian soldiers drowning when cannonballs break the ice beneath their horses' hooves. Probably didn't happen as depicted, but it looks fantastic, so print (or digitally export, or whatever) the legend.