Making matters worse there is an uneven performance by Joaquin Phoenix. There is, in Napoleon, no one to root for.
Somehow we care nothing about them either. There are battles a'plenty but the reason for them is elusive. His hatred for anything not France is clear, but the reasons for this hatred are never explained. We know he loves France but aside from living there we don't know what drives his passion. But this film deals only with (a) Napoleon the warrior and (b) Napoleon the husband, and fails to deliver a well-rounded character in either sense. Napoleon Bonaparte as Emperor of France did a lot of good things much of the country's 'Civil Code' was instituted during his reign. Now that I have seen the film, I am laughing no longer. Another reviewer wrote that he / she had trouble staying awake through its 2 hours 40 minutes run-time. A flat un-involving story about characters who are in every way unlikable. And what I discovered is that it's bad in the worst kind of way It is dull.
I read the reviews of Ridley Scott's 'Napoleon' and knew it was not the great film everyone anticipated.