For all of its epic battle scenes and moments of awe-inspiring bloodshed, Napoleon isn’t the movie many expected it to be. While its scale and narrative ambitions are similar to Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven, the film offers a very different look at history than either of those two, Ridley Scott-directed epics. It is, first and foremost, incredibly funny. The relationship between Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon and Vanessa Kirby’s Josephine results in marital spats that are as outright hilarious as they are emotionally messy, and the movie’s depiction of its infamous French leader occasionally veers into pure farce.
