THREE AND 1/2 STARS
Napoleon Bonaparte He is one of the characters that has appeared the most in cinema in its entire history. And always in a grandiloquent, wild way, from the inaugural biography of Abel Gance from the 1920s (from the last century, obviously) to this enormous gigantomachy of Ridley Scott in the middle of the 20s (of this century, obviously).
So much of what could be a defect is actually a virtue: you cannot tell about this kind of historical monster (in every sense) without falling into the gigantic and outrageous. The Napoleon of Joaquin Phoenix (actor who seems to take an Intensidol Extra pill in every performance; sometimes it works) is a portrait in more ways than one: he resembles what the commonplace has created around the character and, at the same time, he seems like a tragic superhero who becomes a villain, a bit as the Bonapartist fanatic Stendhal described him in his biography.
But what one wants here is unbridled loving passion (it works well for that Vanessa Kirby) and tremendous battles (Scott knows how to film them, as he demonstrated in Gladiator). Of course: the director’s debut film, the beautiful The Duelists, is a much better portrait of this era, which says the same thing but from the side and in a universal way.
