Napoleon Bonaparte defeated, amongst others, the Austrians, the Russians, the Mamluks, the Spanish, and (though this is less well-known) even the British, on occasion. And he also managed to get the better of Stanley Kubrick, albeit in a slightly different arena – the director's copious notes and other planning materials for his proposed Napoleon movie were one of the centrepieces of the Kubrick exhibition in London in 2019. You can see why such a major figure would attract film-makers – a bit of romance, a bit of politics, quite a lot of action, some really fancy hats – and there have been some significant Boneys down the years – Brando, Rod Steiger, Ian Holm (twice), and so on. But Kubrick's failure to do a full biopic of the little fellow seems to have spooked the rest of the pack for quite a few years now.

Nevertheless, here comes Ridley Scott, a man who has probably earned the right to be called a great director even if just on the strength of his box office returns. Perhaps I am letting my indifference to some of Scott's most popular films cloud my judgement, but even I will happily agree that he's been on great form for the last few years. But can he succeed where Kubrick couldn't?

Joaquin Phoenix plays Napoleon, who at the start of the film is present for the guillotining of Marie Antoinette – there's something rather odd, if you ask me, about some critics grumbling that this is ahistorical, given no-one let out a peep when Augusto Pinochet turned up to the same event in El Conde earlier this year. But that's them critics for you I suppose. At this point our man is an ambitious young artillery officer on the make, who spies the chance of advancement when the chance comes to help turf the British out of Toulon. A daring assault ensues, with Napoleon's horse being literally blasted out from under him, but the action is a successful one. Napoleon's profile soars to heights even greater than those of his former steed's viscera.

Celebrity status beckons and with it an entanglement with Josephine de Beauharnais (another semi-royal role for Vanessa Kirby, who has previously played Queen Isabella the She-Wolf of France, Princess Margaret and Jason Statham's sister). The old 'Not tonight, Josephine' line doesn't get a look in here – 'Seeing as we've got five minutes spare, Josephine. . . ' would be closer to it. But needless to say it is a tempestuous relationship, with many ups and downs in additional to all the ups and downs.

Eventually Napoleon manages to drag himself away to become a sort of French Caesar, seizing power and eventually crowning himself Emperor of France, which I suppose is nice work if you can get it. But all political careers end in failure, and a misjudged invasion of Russia culminates in Napoleon finding his career on the wrong track, with its terminus at Waterloo...

So, you know, a big historical epic, which is a genre in which Ridley Scott has significant form – especially if one recalls that his first film, The Duellists, was set in this same period. (The other film which feels like it's casting a shadow over this one is, perhaps inevitably, Barry Lyndon, though Napoleon has a lot more pace and incident.) It's not quite on the same scale as Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo, which featured 17,000 Red Army soldiers as extras and battlefield landscaping including the bulldozing of hills and the laying of pipes to ensure enough mud, but still – no-one else does this sort of thing nowadays with the same kind of panache as Scott.

You can imagine Ridley Scott rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of getting to put some of the big battle sequences on the screen – the big mid-film sequence is the Battle of Austerlitz, which – I'm avoiding spoilers, naturally – Scott realises with great invention and energy. That said, none of the big battles really get the time they probably deserve, with Borodino on the screen for less than a minute, probably. Even when it comes to Waterloo, it's more a sort of rough outline of the battle rather than a detailed treatment. The film has over a quarter of a century of history to make sense of – personal, political, and military – so it's really obliged to take it at the gallop.

It's actually quite hard to imagine the pre-scripting phase of Napoleon as being much more than Scott and his writer David Scarpa sitting down and drawing up a tick-list of the bits of Bonaparte's life they wanted to include, although the long-lasting feelings he has for Josephine provide a sort of theme for the movie. In the hands of a less assured director this movie – heavily annotated with explanatory captions as it is – might feel like a slightly awkward plunge through history rather than a coherent narrative.

Even so, if you turn up for this film hoping to come away with an insight into Napoleon Bonaparte's character and the finer points of history, you are likely to come away disappointed – I mean, I've flicked through War and Peace and played a bit of Total War: Empire, so I had a vague sense of the story in advance, but there isn't much sense of a wider context for events, or of their significance (Tolstoy would probably have serious problems with this film, by the way, as it seems – almost instinctively – to be subscribing to the Great Man view of history).

So I suppose you could argue that Napoleon ultimately stumbles into the gap between the commercial historical epic and the more strictly high-minded film – too much fine detail for one crowd, too much blood and thunder for the other. But it is a pacy romp, if nothing else, anchored by a subtly magnetic turn from Phoenix, and Scott is very much in his comfort zone as a director. I never really felt engaged on an emotional level, but I did come away from the film under the impression I had learned a few things, and certain I had seen something ambitious and spectacular. And that combination of qualities should never be disparaged.

Awix

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