IN RIDLEY SCOTT'S 'NAPOLEON,' THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES BUT PLENTY OF EGO

For such a famed historical figure, Napoleon has made only fleeting appearances in movies since Abel Gance’s 1927 silent film.

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Stanley Kubrick had grand designs for a Napoleon epic that went unmade. (Steven Spielberg is attempting to revive those plans as a series ). Napoleon and his bicorne hat — more icon of history than a real character — mostly only pops up in time-traveling odysseys like “Time Bandits” or “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

The party, though, is finally on in Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon,” starring Joaquin Phoenix. Scott doesn’t do anything small, not even famously diminutive French emperors. And his two-hour38-minute big-screen biopic serves up a heaping historical spectacle complete with bloody European battles and massive military maneuvers.

But don’t mistake “Napoleon” for your average historical epic. Our first sense that this may not be a grand glorification of a Great Man of history comes early in the film, when a 24-year-old Bonaparte leads the siege on the British troops controlling the port city of Toulon. When Napoleon, then a major, charges forward in the fight, he’s visibly terrified, even panting. He looks more like Phoenix’s anxious protagonist in “Beau Is Afraid” than the man who would become France’s Caesar. Napoleon doesn’t storm the gates so much as lurch desperately at them.

And for the rest of Scott’s film and Phoenix’s riveting performance, Napoleon’s actions are never much more complicated than that. He assumes power cavalierly. His coup d’état against the French Directory in 1799 is a ramshackle farce. He flings his armies around the continent without the slightest concern. He’s prone to petulant rages, screaming at the British: “You think you’re so great because you have boats!”