It sounds strange to say that a 2-hour-and-38-minute-long epic like Ridley Scott’s Napoleon feels rushed, but even a runtime that capacious proves too short for this ambitious but muddled film to cover almost three decades of its subject’s absurdly eventful life. Between his rise to power in his mid-20s and his death in 1821 at age 51 (played at all those ages by the 49-year-old Joaquin Phoenix), Napoleon Bonaparte packed in a lot of history-making. He was a brash military leader and a passionate supporter of the anti-royalist ideals of the French Revolution who would nonetheless seize control of the country in a coup d’état and, soon after, crown himself emperor in a ceremony of unprecedented pomp: The famous Jacques-Louis David painting of the coronation, with the would-be Caesar holding the royal headgear aloft, is reproduced by Scott in precise and sumptuous detail.
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