Forty-six years and more than two dozen films ago, British filmmaking legend Ridley Scott made his feature debut with The Duellists, a thrifty but gorgeous account of a violent rivalry between two officers in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army. To their credit, his dueling American leads, the Brooklyn-reared Harvey Keitel and the Northern Californian Keith Carradine, made not the slightest attempt to look or sound like 19th-century Frenchmen.

But they might as well be the Marquis de Lafayette compared to the sleepy mumblecore shuffle Joaquin Phoenix brings to the title role of Napoleon, Sir Ridley’s return to this setting and era. 

This gory but thematically bloodless 160-minute biopic runs an hour longer than The Duellists, covers an even greater expanse of time—28 years, from the beheading of Marie Antoinette up through Napoleon’s death in exile in 1821—and cost more than 40 times what The Duellists did way back when, adjusted for inflation. Which just goes to show you that $200 million of Apple’s money (the same princely sum the tech giant spent on Martin Scorsese’s far more enthralling Killers of the Flower Moon) can buy you sweeping locations and hundreds of period-accurate costumes and practically shot battle scenes, but it can’t buy a point of view. Napoleon is a handsome but deathly dull coffee table book of a movie, glancing toward but never fully committing to the Kubrickian comedy it aims to be. (Stanley Kubrick spent years trying to get a big-budget Napoleon biopic made, though it never came to pass.)

I’ll put that failing somewhat on Scott’s inability to land on a consistent tone but mostly on the shoulders of his star. With Daniel Day–Lewis having abdicated the role, Phoenix stands as the what’s-he-gonna-do-this-time film actor of his generation. What he’s opted to do this time is, to quote Chinatown, “as little as possible.” Perhaps he used up all his energy anchoring last spring’s Beau Is Afraid—a three-hour psychological horror comedy that swung for the fences. Maybe he was saving himself for Lady Gaga, his co-star in the forthcoming (and French!) musical sequel Joker: Folie à Deux.

Screenwriter David Scarpa has opted to use Napoleon’s 14-year marriage to Josephine (his first, her second) as the fulcrum of the narrative, and you can feel Vanessa Kirby, our Josephine, fairly begging her top-billed scene partner to give her something. If she’s wasted in the latter two Mission: Impossible flicks, as some have claimed, her misappropriation here is more surprising and lamentable.

Phoenix got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor from his heel turn as the craven (and fictional) Roman emperor Commodus in Scott’s Best Picture-winning Gladiator back in 2000. That performance worked in part because his weaseliness contrasted against more stoic work from the likes of Russell Crowe, Oliver Reed, and Richard Harris. Phoenix didn’t have to carry the movie. Here he does, because Scarpa hasn’t given Josephine any sort of identity apart from her association with Napoleon, which seems to pivot between genuine affection and mere survival instinct from scene to scene. Sexual chemistry is no part of it: There’s a running gag about what a lousy lay the great man was, with Kirby wearing a bored expression through one rabbit-speed, doggy-style coupling after which Phoenix declares, “Let that good work make us a son.”

The other laugh lines Scarpa has given Phoenix land, too. Clearly we’re meant to chuckle when he claims, “I am not subject to petty insecurity,” and to guffaw when he explodes at one of his British opponents, “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” The writer and the actor both want to puncture the Great Man myth, and it’s a laudable impulse. But their comic aspirations mix like oil and water with Scott’s maximalism. Something more modest in scale like The Duellists—or hell, a stage play about Napoleon and Josephine that kept all the battles offstage—would’ve suited their intentions better. Especially considering that cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, working with Scott for a ninth time, has opted to shoot Napoleon’s various campaigns in a washed-out, grayscale color palette that inspires droopy eyelids rather than awe or revulsion. (Title cards at the end of the film present the casualty estimates from Napoleon’s 61 recorded battles, a number north of 3 million.)

Napoleon gets a jolt in its final hour from the appearance of Rupert Everett as the Duke of Wellington, one of the British military commanders who finally defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. But by the time he shows up, it’s too late for the movie’s Wiki-style survey of the latter 60 percent of Napoleon’s life to course-correct into something more compelling. The movie’s most memorable bit comes early: Napoleon woos Josephine by honoring her young son’s request that Napoleon return to him a sword that belonged to his father, who, like Josephine, was imprisoned during the Reign of Terror, but unlike Josephine was sent to the guillotine. Visiting an armory and learning that no one kept track of which sword was confiscated from whom, the future emperor just grabs one at random and passes it off as an heirloom. Perhaps the rumored four-hour cut of Napoleon that will appear on Apple+ in January will contain more such morsels of revelation. Meanwhile, Scott and Scarpa are collaborating on another movie scheduled for release this time next year, one you could be forgiven for thinking it might be the 85-year-old Scott’s Waterloo: It’s sequel to Gladiator.

At least it’s not a musical.

Napoleon opens in area theaters on Nov. 21 and will appear on the Apple+ streaming shortly.