Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby. Written by David Scarpa. Directed by Ridley Scott. Budge $130-200 million. Running time 157 minutes long.
Unlike the film this review will be blissfully short.
The life-story of history's shortest historical figure, Napoleon, or Nappy as his mates called him, from the time he lead an assault to take a fort in the Seige of Toulon to the bit when he was exiled on a Caribbean island and died.
Gotta say I was well pissed off by this, expecting, as I was, a bio pic of Abba's breakthrough Euorvision song entry of 1974, Waterloo! Imagine my disappointment then that rather than watching the rise of the greatest Eurovision Song band of all time I had to watch the rise and fall a grumpy little megalomaniac in a funny hat.
Racing through 28 years of the diminutive one's life at breakneck speed you don't get time to breathe as key events are ticked off the unseen checklist of the director. Battles are staged, beautiful costumes are worn and bits of history are dispensed with the rapidity of candy pellets fired from a Pez head.
Ridley Scott directs with all the uninterested passion of a bloke just checking off one more item from his bucket list. He famously quipped that in the time it took Martin Scorsese to make Killers of a Harvest Moon he'd bashed out four films. Ridley, that's not something to be proud of, maybe you should consider slowing down and tightening up the scripts a bit more before filming.
Anyway, it looks good, the acting is okay, although Vanessa Kirby is royally wasted in her role as the apple of Boney's eye, and Joquain Phoenix does what he always does, mope around and look very earnest. And the film becomes unintentionally hilarious at several points during this film, never more so than the sex scenes which are hysterical.
Ultimately all this does is make you wish that Stanley Kubrick had got to make his version of Boney's life rather than Ridley Scott who pays homage to Stan by trying to mimic the wonderful candle light cinematography of Barry Lydon, although all he manages to do is make a murky and gloomy looking film. Although the battle scenes are extremely well done and fantastically well mounted.
I think I'll stick to infinitely better 1970 movie Waterloo starring Rod Steiger and directed by Sergei Bondarchuk.
7/10
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