Overview: Napoleon is a spectacle-filled action epic that details the checkered rise and fall of the iconic French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, played by Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix.

Against a stunning backdrop of large-scale filmmaking orchestrated by legendary director Ridley Scott, the film captures Bonaparte’s relentless journey to power through the prism of his addictive, volatile relationship with his one true love, Josephine, showcasing his visionary military and political tactics against some of the most dynamic practical battle sequences ever filmed.

Verdict: When it comes to battle tactics, Napoleon Bonaparte (as played by Joaquin Phoenix) is very gun forward. There are few conflicts he marches into that don’t involve the firing of many cannons, an instinct befitting his status as an artillery commander in the French military — the organization he quickly transcended to become the leader of his country by the age of 30.

But it also mirrors his rash, preening, sometimes awkward charm in Ridley Scott’s new film, Napoleon, a biography that fast-forwards through the major events of Napoleon’s life and presents him as equal parts confident and arrogant, making for a roller coaster of the ego that’s surprisingly full of laughs.

“I found the crown of France just lying in the gutter, so I picked it up with the tip of my sword.” – Joaquin Phoenix as “Napoleon”.

What a bloody fool, that Napoleon!

As you’d expect, Ridley Scott’s sweeping, decades-spanning and magnificently filmed epic “Napoleon” is a stylized and violent interpretation of the life and times of one of the most famous and infamous military commanders and political leaders history has ever known — but it’s also a surprisingly funny indictment of a sniveling brute of a man who is utterly unaware of his shortcomings, so to speak.

When a riveting, screen-chewing, always watchable Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon says with a straight face that he is not a man given to insecurities — well, that’s just hilarious. It’s Napoleon’s insecurity, and his narcissism, and his petulance, and his quenchless thirst for glory and victory that drive this man to seek out war after war after war, with almost no thought given to the thousands upon thousands of lives that are lost in the process. He’s an 18th century mobster in a bicorne hat.

The great and prolific Scott (“Alien,” “Blade Runner,” “Gladiator,” “Black Hawk Down”), now 85, and screenwriter David Scarpa stay faithful to the historical timeline over the 158-minute running time (things actually move FAST), as we follow events from the Reign of Terror in the early 1790s through Napoleon’s death in fetid exile in 1821. But if you’re looking for painstaking devotion to accuracy, you’re in the wrong theater.

We’ve got the American Joaquin Phoenix playing the Corsican-born Napoleon; a Brit (Vanessa Kirby) as Joséphine; a French-Finnish actor (Édouard Philipponnat) in the role of Alexander I, the tsar of Russia, and a number of British actors playing French officials. There are no subtitles, no attempts by the leads in the cast to affect French accents. (Thank goodness).

Oh, and in this telling of the tale, a young Napoleon was in the crowd when Marie Antoinette was guillotined, and the film also gives life to the old folk tale that has Napoleon’s troops firing cannons on the Great Pyramids during the 1798 invasion of Egypt. (Spoiler alert: Never happened!).

As the closing title cards note, Napoleon presided over more than 60 battles, a half-dozen which are depicted here, with Scott and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski often using widescreen longshots to depict the utter chaos and madness of war. We also get some of Scott’s trademark visceral imagery, as in a scene of the 24-year-old Napoleon’s early signature victory at Toulon in which a cannonball strikes Napoleon’s horse in the chest, sending the poor beast down while Napoleon struggles to free himself and rejoin the battle.

“Napoleon” is filled with blood-spattered battle sequences and myriad powerful scenes, from cannons sinking ships to the burning of Moscow — but the film spends nearly as much time on the volatile and complex relationship between Napoleon and Joséphine.