I wish this would have just been about the Battle of Waterloo (1815) as it’s the only time this movie truly ignites, and that’s despite the battlefield inaccuracies and the atrocious performance of Rupert Everett as the Duke of Wellington, the ’90s throwback playing Wellesley as a snarling thug rather than aristocratic master of defensive battle.
The first 45 minutes are great, Napoleon awestruck by Joséphine and proceeding to act in the most hilariously childlike manner, a supreme baby smitten. It’s very funny and it’s a shame it didn’t stay this way, a couple’s domestic melodrama taken to the extremes of the world stage. Unfortunately, what follows is a series of scenes from your basic high school history lesson with nothing holding them together. Don’t expect a character study but a truncated telling of events. It’s an enigmatic performance from Phoenix and he’s always engrossing; the drama, however, is zilch.
Hurried, unfocused, and often boring, it’s a technical marvel with sumptuous visuals but a decent script would have helped. There’s no sense of the wider historical forces that enabled or expanded the Napoleonic Wars, or any concerted attempt to explore the lad’s mammoth fall. Here, it just … happens.
I’ll wait for the four-hour cut I keep hearing about.
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Wanderings and ... wonderings. 