Bookshelf Battle

Will this review be your Waterloo, 3.5 readers?

BQB here with a review of the biopic of history’s most reviled short Frenchman.

It was a time when the French actually won wars and weren’t the cheese eating surrender monkeys you’ve come to know and love or chronically lampoon today. In the wake of the French revolution, where the rabble got way too guillotine happy and didn’t just guillotine the king and queen but also the king and queen’s friends, cousins, dog walkers, second cousins, pool boys, confidantes, and literally anyone who had ever sneezed in the same room for such was the hatred of the monarchy that they just lopped off the heads of anyone with even the most untenable six degrees of seperation to the monarchy, a power vacuum arises and Nappy Old Boy steps up to fill it.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Napoleon as an awkward nerd, a doofus obsessed with power but lacking the social skills to acquire it, relying on constant coaching from his mother and wife, Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) to drag his ass across the finish line. True enough, Nappy is a warrior through and through, a great strategist who knows how to kick ass, win battles, and conquer Europe, but he needs the ladies to teach him how to carry on with diplomacy and talking to heads of state and so forth. In Phoenix’s performance, we’re almost led to believe that Napoleon was somewhat of the Zuckerburg or Steve Jobs of his day, a true nerd’s nerd, brilliant but socially inept, full of great ideas but struggling to express those ideas, better at recruiting other geniuses and taking credit for their genius. Although make no mistake – he was a battlefield genius.

Vanessa Kirby steals the show as Josephine and this is arguably just as much her movie as it is Napoleon’s. The French power couple fall in love and theirs is a love that is equal parts nourishment and poison. They lift each other up – Napoleon pulls her out of low social status caused by her deceased cheating husband and years of false imprisonment from the revolution. Josephine quite literally bangs the self-confidence Napoleon needs to be a better ruler into him with her vagina. The whole thesis of the flick is literally that if Josephine had not been so good at banging, Napoleon would not have conquered Europe, so ladies, the next time you’re down on your husband for his lack of ambition, consider upping your sex game.

Alas, they hurt each other as well. Old Josie can’t go long without the wang and Nappy’s job takes him on long work trips, so she goes in search of said wang elsewhere, which causes Nappy great pain and sorrow. Meanwhile, Nappy wants an heir, not just for his personal ego but for the stability of Europe, and Josie’s old dried up cooch can’t produce one, so he casts her aside, even though to do so causes him further great sorrow. Theirs is a great love story of two people whose love was so strong that when it worked they caused each other great joy and when it didn’t they brough each other great misery. There wasn’t much of a middle ground.

Phoenix is great in this role, playing the fumbling nerd well. In one scene, he psyches himself out, preparing to deliver a clever, biting ultimatum to a rival king but once in his presence, the best he can do is shout, “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” and then storm off. I could see Phoenix getting noms, though he has won before.

Personally, I believe this will go down as Kirby’s big breakthrough role. She’s been piling up solid performances for years. You might know as one of the villains in the latest Mission Impossible flicks. She’s delightfully British in a playful sort of way. Not to be gauche but I added her to the top of my fap list awhile ago and soon she’ll be a household name as I’d be very surprised if she doesn’t take home an Oscar for playing the woman who humped Napoleon into emperordom.

The movie take a structure of Nappy’s greatest hits, so if you know the history, you might already know the story. A little more depth into his childhood, why he was such an awkard doofus and so on would have been nice. Josephine is also a prolific ho-bag and it would have been nice to explore what made her such a ho-bag. But the movie has a lot of ground to cover so it doesn’t get into the nitty gritty deets. Still a great flick.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy. I’d like to thank Hollywood for not effing this up. In recent months, I’ve lost faith in Hollywood. I’d been looking forward to this one, but I’ve looked forward to other movies, only to find them to be woke stinkburgers. I feared this would be the same. Perhaps Napoleon would be turned into a gay trans biracial lesbian fighting the patrarchical Wellington at Waterloo and I’d demand my money back. But nope. They played the history pretty straight.