Napoleon: Ridley Scott’s biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte often creates a doubt: is the film a (failed) attempt at satire, or does it really take itself seriously? The humorless, joyless performance of Joaquin Phoenix as the title character suggests it’s the second, but moments of the film embrace the camp with such gusto that the problem perhaps is that the project shifted at some point from one to the other and some artists were simply not informed. In any case, the portrait is so shallow, so dull that the inconsistent tone is the least of the film’s problems (not to mention its alleged historical inaccuracies, but that would be neither here nor there if the film otherwise worked). Phoenix is just an annoyed and annoying character and he fails to project the man’s tactical genius; Vanessa Kirby, at least, embraces the campy side of the film in a livelier performance, and she has a more interesting character to play with anyway. Visually, the film is a spectacle; yes, cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s images are washed out to one inch of their lives to give the film its sense of grittiness, and editors Claire Simpson and Sam Restivo over-edit the battles to the point of visual incomprehensibility, but the work of costume designers David Crossman and Janty Yates is a beauty to behold.