Ridley Scott's ‘Napoleon’ is a dull recounting of events with no poetry, nuance

Scott has now made a version of “Napoleon,” and it’s apparent that if Kubrick had any special advice on the topic, he never gave it to Scott.

Scott has been and still could be a great filmmaker (see “Alien,” “Blade Runner,” and “Thelma and Louise”), but his new two-and-a-half-hour epic, now playing in San Francisco, is as rudimentary and as passionless as CliffsNotes. It’s akin to a bored professor teaching from a droning study guide.

To begin with, there are too many secondary or supporting characters that pop up and then disappear like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Most are briefly introduced, and then vanish for a while, only to re-emerge again maybe a half hour or 45 minutes later.

Frankly, for anyone who is not a Napoleon scholar, it’s difficult to keep track of all the names and dates and places, especially as events leap forward years at a time. It’s a memory card game with little chance of winning.

The movie begins in 1793 — thankfully avoiding Napoleon’s childhood — as Marie Antoinette (Catherine Walker) goes to the guillotine. As she walks to her death, an angry crowd throws food, which sticks in her voluminous, curly hair. Then, head, hair, and food must be maneuvered into the hollow of the guillotine for the fatal chop.

This, weirdly, is the movie’s most inspired sequence, and the only time Scott seems to be thinking cinematically. The rest of the film ticks off check boxes.

Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) rises through the ranks of the French military, goes to war, becomes emperor, gains allies, loses allies, regains allies, is eventually defeated at Waterloo and finally is exiled on the island of Saint Helena, where he died in 1821.

Many viewers will pay to see the many battlefield sequences with their mud, blood, horses, flags, spy glasses, swords, rifles, lances, and cannons — the cannonballs here explode like miniature atomic bombs — but the scenes blur together.

At the film’s center, we have Phoenix, who, most can agree, is a fine actor. Phoenix does fine things with Napoleon, showing his lust for power, his self-assurance, as well as his baser emotions.

It’s a well-rounded performance, even incorporating some moments of humor — let’s hope the line “DESTINY led me to this lamb chop!!!” becomes a meme — but not necessarily among Phoenix’s deepest or most affecting work.

Where “Napoleon” comes briefly alive is in the casting and performance of Vanessa Kirby — herself a recent Oscar nominee for “Pieces of a Woman” — as Napoleon’s wife Josephine.

This character might have been little more than window dressing , but Kirby brings flash and fire to the role, easily the equal of Phoenix. Their scenes together are the only ones that have any spark, perhaps because the performers each feed off of the energy of their sparring partners.

It’s a shame that “Napoleon” is such drudgery. In past decades, when studios learned that biographies are catnip for Oscars, it has become clear that the best ones — Bennett Miller’s “Capote” or Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” for example — focus on a single, important event in the subject’s life.

The ones that try to cram an entire life into the length of a movie tend to end up like “Napoleon,” with scene after scene describing to us what happened, without ever getting into the poetry of it, and without time for nuance.

Ironically, if Scott’s film could have gone on longer, he might have ended up with something truly magnificent and spectacular — such as Abel Gance’s silent-era “Napoleon,” released in 1927, and restored to a five-and-a-half-hour running time in 2012. That movie was so inventive and intoxicating that it has endured for nearly a century.

Conversely, the most interesting thing about Scott’s “Napoleon” is the tidbit that, apparently, the emperor had a talent for falling asleep while standing or sitting up.

Quite a few ticket-buyers will likely have that in common with him.